A Study Of The Aesthetic Pursuant And Aesthetic Characteristic Of Literati Impressionistic Garden

Literati impressionistic garden is a kind of garden express the emotion and ideal of Chinese scholar with expression technique learning from freehand painting which exists from the Northern Song Dynasty to the Ming and Qing dynasties. Literati impressionistic garden represents the highest achievement of classical Chinese gardening art.Because of scholar’s participation, aesthetic transition happened in Chinese classic garden from Song Dynasty:The luxury and noble style replaced by a natural and simple way; Not looking for reality way of landscape simulation, but abstract expression with man-made rockeries and ponds; transferred from the simple living place into works of art.These three levels of steering in the gardening art changed the appearance of garden dramatically, and formed a unique aesthetic characteristics and aesthetic pursuit. The purpose of this paper is to study the most important aesthetic characteristics and aesthetic pursuit of literati impressionistic garden, revealing the advantages compared to the classical Chinese garden previous to literati impressionistic garden and foreign garden, analysis historical and cultural causes of these characteristics and the pursuit.The first chapter studied the impact of Chinese traditional painting on garden. Ancient Chinese has a keen interest in landscape. They used the particular elements in freehand paintings and landscape painting into man-made hills, such as "cun fa", a special technique of using writing-brush, and the overall arrangement of the drawings. Other Chinese aesthetics and painting theories influenced the rockeries building deeply, such like "learning to the Dao of real mountain", and "produce the Qi and Rhyme of object vividly". Chapter Ⅱ researches the relationship of the establishment of theme of garden and Neo-Confucianism. The emergence of the theme is an important symbol of the literati impressionistic garden. The scholars combined social ideals, values, cosmology into the small garden, which formed the most essential features of the landscape art. In a given historical period, the author’s thinking and the pursuit affect deeply by Neo-Confucianism, as a result, what they expression in garden is about Pursuit of the Confucian social ideals and moral ideals. Influence by the thought of "Joys shared with the public", the garden has a certain openness, which promoted the garden aesthetic activities.Another important feature of literati impressionistic garden, the pursuit of natural, will be studied in Chapter Ⅲ. It not only reflects in the material aspects of the garden landscape, but also possesses abundant cultural connotation. The literati garden developed abstraction means that the "impressionistic landscapes" and rich spiritual implication, but a rich sensory experience is still a very important constituent elements in the garden. And the ancients combined the aesthetic sense and the spiritual pursuit of near-natural into unique style differ from the geometric style gardens in Europe and abstract dry garden in Japan.The methodology combining the history with reality, home with abroad, theory with practice is followed in the process of research, and the objective is to clarify the aesthetic characteristics and aesthetic pursuits of the literati impressionistic garden and lay the foundation for the Chinese classical gardens going toward the world.