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Written by Debra Brehmer, Contributing writer
Jun 16, 2011
Screen panel of Zitan, lacquer, jade and gold paint. – Photo: Courtesy
The summer of China has arrived at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
After much hype as well as some controversy regarding whether MAM should respond to the imprisonment of China’s leading contemporary artist Ai Weiwei, the doors have opened to five stunning exhibitions.
The objects in these exhibitions are perhaps powerful enough to carry us, at least momentarily, away from worldly concerns, as we try to digest “differences” between Eastern and Western modes of thought. It is through this object sense of history that we most fully enter another consciousness.
The central exhibition, which originated at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City.” Milwaukee is the third and last stop.
The Forbidden City (in Beijing) was like Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles. It was the home and political center of the Chinese emperors for nearly 500 years. The first 980 buildings on the site were erected by 1420, and by the time the last leader abdicated in 1925, 24 emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties had called it home.
Parts of the Forbidden City were turned into a museum after it fell into disuse in 1925. Lacking the funds or interest to preserve them, other sections, including the Qianlong Garden, were simply sealed off.
In 1996, the World Monuments Fund identified the long-abandoned Qianlong Garden as a conservation project. Restoration began in 2001 and will be completed in 2019, when the garden will open to the public.
Qianlong (pronounced Chee-en lohng) reigned during the 18th century (1736-1795). He was a contemporary of George Washington. At age 61, he decided to build a retirement complex called a Ningshougong or Garden of Tranquility and Longevity. He reasoned that a place of beauty and quietude would relieve the stress of ruling the largest, most powerful nation in the world.
While Confucianism outlines military rigor and conformism, Daoism and Buddhism call for non-doing and the return to nature as a means of purification. Herein lies the spirit of Qianlong’s garden.
Qianlong used a two-acre site in the northeast corner of the 180-acre Forbidden City to fashion his imperial earthly paradise. Curving paths lined with ancient trees and rock gardens lead through four sections containing 27 small, poetically named buildings: “Hall of Fulfilling Original Wishes,” “Terrace for Collecting Morning Dew,” “Studio of Self Restraint,” “Building of Extending Delight,” and “Supreme Chamber of Cultivating Harmony.”
The first room of the exhibition hosts two large portraits of the emperor painted on silk. To the left, Qianlong sits in a throne in imperial yellow robes. An aged, wizened face carries the weight of a 60-year reign. We sense his need for a walk in the garden.
On the opposite wall is a fresh face. A New Year’s domestic scene shows a younger Qianlong surrounded by frolicking children or heirs to the throne. These two portraits set up a nice dichotomy that plays out formally in the art as well: Control (enthroned absolute monarch) versus nature (emperor on porch, kids running amuck).
Qianlong was an erudite, scholarly ruler and devout Buddhist. He wrote 40,000 poems. His interest in worldly goods and foreign inventions was fed by traveling Jesuits, as evidenced in the exhibition by ornate clocks, glass and illusionistic European painting techniques.
Amid this splendor, ironically, a large natural rock presented on a pedestal dominates the show. Its un-tooled earthiness and sculptural shape represents a profound reverence for nature.
The magnificence of natural forms held the same aesthetic weight as miles of inlayed jade and carved Zitan. Mountains were considered sacred places and the literati collected rocks. The more protuberances and voids the better as to imagine a tiny human dwarfed by the craggy forms. The scholar’s throne in this room is likewise made from many assembled, twisted tree roots, representing another harmonious union of man and nature, each allowed to speak his own name.
Throughout the exhibition the intertwining of nature, spirituality and political power takes many forms. Each object seems to work out its own visual and symbolic accord between absolute imperial control (wealth and power) and the humbling sovereignty of the natural world (beauty and mystery). It’s a fascinating design exchange between zhuo (the awkward) and mei (prettiness or power).
A 16-panel wood-and-lacquer screen presented as a gift to the emperor offers another royal reverie on the theme. One side contains marvelously detailed plants painted with gold and silver. The other side holds inlaid white jade images of 16 enlightened disciples of Buddha, called Luohans. These old men are hunched and ugly, suggesting the unimportance of external appearances.
We can easily relate to this show, even though it feels like a different language. With our cottages in Northern Wisconsin we seek similar solace, to flee the “worldly noise,” as Qianlong called it. The need to renew one’s soul within the natural world is a universal drive that Qianlong had the means to realize without restraint.
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