Owner's Residence: "see" As The Domain Of Classical Garden Culture

The common study method regards the garden mainly as physical form in Cartesian space rather than its immaterial qualities. To gain certain meanings in the cultural territory of the garden, form must possess certain kind of memories and signifying qualities. The full grasp of Chinese garden meanings can be achieved only through the symbolic and memorial transition of the inhabitant's vitality and non-vitality of his surroundings. Such memory and signs includes specific framework-the Master's value syst em, verbal, visual, life style and philosophy. As a matter of fact, during the evolution of the garden physicality, the concrete form cannot contain the last meaning because it constantly shifts with its social and cultural characters. At the same time, the internal meanings generate the themes of spatial language in the lasting memory and become relatively stable in the end, whereas the Master's sense and styles of making re-illustrate the garden and the place.The thesis contains five chapters. At first, Chapter One describes the notion of the Master in the Garden Making. Through the relation between the Master and the hill, thoughts about the body and the world are examined in the "Dragon Mount Villas" and "Huanxiu Villas". Then, starting from the "Dream" of historic garden writing and painting, and its influence on garden spatial aesthetics, Chapter Two argues that the beauty of seclusion comes from the understanding about nature as well as the social, political detour, dislocation and suspension of the Master identity. The third chapter analyzes the inter-reaction among the garden paintings. While the "one-stroke" drawing signifies the original meaning of arts' main body construction, landscape painting forms spatial mobility, structural hierarchy, and dilutes the contradiction between the plan and the depth through parallel drawing. Chapter Four analyzes the Humble Administrator Garden and its related documents through comparative study between the way of how to look at the world in painting and poem, and garden's spatial quality. The textual abstraction becomes the common ground for both spatial thinking and matter form. Water, the perfect "writing", gives the expression of garden's embrace and return to nature. The last chapter summarizes the Master's fundamental concepts about time and space, in which the garden epitomizes the world and restores the setting of the Master's life. The Master's being gives birth to the possibility of limit space into limitless time where form and entity become one. In the end, the garden's originality and dissociation are argued, and the analysis of "dissociation" constructs dynamic condition of the body and the text, in which the Master "is" in place and left trace to become what the garden truly is.Through exploring the definition and deeper structure of Chinese ancient notions-the "body" and "text"-in the visual domain of "seeing", the thesis analyzes Chinese ancient garden space, painting, writing, garden-making events and their cultural motives from new perspectives. It is an attempt to interpret the interrelation between the Master and the spatiality of his garden. From Chinese text-the origin of Chinese garden's spatiality-rather geometrical, static formal analysis, the thesis argues that the relationship between the Master and the garden is established on the duality of construction and generation in which the Master role, both active and passive, from the viewpoint of ontology, is the key to solve the issue of being through time and space.