Philosophy And History Of Ideas In The Vision "china's Artistic Spirit"

It has been viewed that the ancient Chinese intellectuals'appreciation of the natural landscape was concerned with Chuang Tzu. The Chinese Artistic Spirit by Xu Fuguan, who was the representative of the modern Neo-Confucianism, can be regarded as the most straightforward expression of this point. However, Chuang Tzu had never shown any appreciation to landscape, let alone advocate withdrawing to mountain forest. So Xu Fuguan had warped Chuang Tzu seriously when he looked Chuang Tzu as a mountain forest hermit. Actually, as the pure expression of the Confucian thoughts and feelings, the landscape discourse of ancient China was derived from Confucius. The relationship between Chuang Tzu and landscape just lies in the fact that Chuang Tzu's artistic spirit of "Xu Jing Ming" plays a crucial role in the generation of concrete landscape art works. But in Xu Fuguan's understanding, Chuang Tzu's spirit presents two images:artistic spirit and landscape spirit, which cannot be merged. This leads to confusion and disorder in his interpretation of Chuang Tzu and Chinese landscape painting art.Xu Fuguan's original intention to advocate Chuang Tzu's artistic spirit was extricating Confucianism from politics with the help of Chuang Tzu's Xujing mind which can dispel any secular heart of fame and fortune. But under the headline of art, what he actually preached was a specific art:landscape painting art, which had been monopolized by ancient Chinese scholar-officials. In this process, he replaced Chuang Tzu's spirit with Confucian landscape ideology unconsciously. Ancient scholar-officials regarded retiring in mountain forest as a way to avoid temple temporarily or permanently, but their political connection and political mission determined that they couldn't really forget temple. Xu Fuguan followed ancient scholar-officials when he interpreted Chuang Tzu with landscape, therefore put Chuang Tzu back in the cultural cage of "temple-mountain forest" who would have tried to jump out of it. This indicates that he couldn't get rid of the historical limitations of ancient scholar-officials in his Chuang Tzu's interpretation. As a result, his Chinese Art Spirit can only become the tracking and record of Chinese ancient scholar-officials' mental tragic history and an expression of his own political frustration in the 1960s. His intention to use landscape painting as a therapy to modern people's mental illness was also a fantasy. Insisting that landscape painting originated from Chuang Tzu's spirit, Xu Fuguan couldn't explain the long time span between Chuang Tzu and the prosperous period of landscape painting. So his narration of Chinese landscape painting art took on a retro look. It stopped him from observing the changes of Chinese landscape painting art after Song and Yuan dynasty with the eyes of development. Chuang Tzu always keeps pure and lofty image as a hermit in his mind's eye, which impeded him to give a reasonable explanation about the amusement element in Chinese landscape culture. For him art was actually a way of struggle against politics.After all, this way of struggle was negative. An idea of skill with positive social and political implications lurks behind Chuang Tzu's artistic spirit. In-depth analysis will manifest that Chuang Tzu's hope did not lie in the mountain forest but in the grass roots. Xu Fuguan had once expressed a opinion that Chinese intellectuals should transfer to the folk and obtain independence from politics, but Confucian position stopped him from interpreting Chuang Tzu using this view. By contrast, Zhang Taiyan's works provided more enlightenment for us in this respect.