Aesthetics West and East

Chinese aesthetics is in many ways a unique tradition. When Greenberg speaks about Avant-garde art, it is quite predictable that he compares it to East Asia:

Western tradition and Western society have produced something historically unique: the avant-garde. Why it was produced in the West alone has to be explained in a variety of ways, only one of which I'll attempt. In its emergence in Paris one hundred-odd years ago the avant-garde was a writers' and artists' effort in a sense in which I can discern no other artistic or cultural tendency to

have been (not even in China or Japan).¹¹⁹

Japan in this context also points to China, or, as Kojin Karatani puts it, Japan is a part of Chinese civilization along with Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia.¹²⁰ This tradition is not only uniquely rich, it is also open for interaction with all the major elements of the Avant-garde art.

The type of Avant-garde art related to free play couldn't avoid in Taiwan the influence of Chinese traditional aesthetics. It seems, that Chinese ink painting presupposes free play. This type of painting allows unrestrained flows of ink on rice paper and spontaneous strokes of the brush, which are almost reaching the abstract expressionists' technique of dripping. This similarity is acknowledged by the leader of abstract expressionism, Jackson Pollock, who is interested in Eastern spirituality.

Pollock's experience with Zen Buddhism can be compared with a reversed situation:

Pollock was a Western artist interested in Eastern spirituality, and in Taiwan there are artists who are native of Eastern spirituality and interested in Western art. Something like this can be found in the meeting of Nam June Paik and John Cage. Paik was studying in Germany and Cage was teaching there. Paik was interested in Western music and Cage was interested in Buddhism. Due to Cage's influence Paik tries to unite his cultural background and spirituality of Buddhism with modern artistic methods. This attempt finds its realization in the creation of Video art.¹²¹

119 Clement Greenberg (1999), Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 35-6.

120 Kojin Karatani (2016), Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud, (trs) Jonathan E. Abel, Darwin H. Tsen, and Hiroki Yoshikuni, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 13.

121 Dieter Daniels (1997), ‘Über Anfänge – Intermedialität und Internationalität der frühen 60er Jahre in der BRD’ in Medien Kunst Aktion: Die 60er und 70er in Deutschland / Media Art Action: the '60s and '70s in Germany, (ed) Rudolf Frieling and Dieter Daniels, Wien and New York: Springer, p. 15.

Besides the purely aesthetic influence, also the cultural background can influence the reception of Avant-garde art in numerous ways. Thus, Taiwanese surrealism is influenced by the cultural background of Taiwan. For example dreams are very important for the surrealists. As Breton writes in the first manifesto of surrealism:

Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (...) has still today been so grossly neglected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams.¹²²

But in the West, dreams are viewed as messages, from gods in antiquity or from the subconsciousness in contemporary psychoanalysis, while Chinese tradition has a different understanding of dreams. In Zhuangzi dreams are viewed as essentially not different from reality: Zhuangzi cannot decide whether he is dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly is dreaming of being Zhuangzi. This difference in cultural background between Western and Taiwan's painters can be considered as the other important moment. Taiwan has a rich tradition of surrealism to work with. The first surrealist group with participants from the island is founded in 1932 in Paris.¹²³ Its name is Le Moulin Poetry Society, it consists of four Taiwanese and three Japanese poets.

The type of Avant-garde art that is related to the absolute has probably the most rich connotations. Lyotard discusses the absolute in the judgment of the sublime, that it “is

122 Andre Breton (1969), ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, (ed) Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, The University of Michigan Press, pp. 10-11.

123 Michelle Yeh (2001), “Introduction” in Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, (ed) N. G. D.

Malmqvist, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 16.

not conceived of as an Idea but only felt.”¹²⁴ Lyotard also claims that the judgment of the sublime, “presupposes both a capacity to conceive of the absolute and a sensibility of the 'presence' of the absolute”¹²⁵ Being a non-religious feeling to Kant, the sublime was analyzed by Lyotard through a religious aspect. Probably it has something to do with Lyotard's own religious views, as it is discussed in 1.3.

Nothing in Kant directly contradicts Lyotard's religious reading of sublime. Kant himself speaks about the sublimity of God (5: 261), and the same is the issue for the pre-Kantian tradition in the theory of the sublime in general. Before Kant, the sublime is often understood as a sign of the supersensible in a religious sense: it is the magnificent world as a creation, which proves the magnificent nature of the creator.¹²⁶ Avant-garde artists are interested in religion, be it theosophy for Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944),¹²⁷ Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)¹²⁸ and much later for Joseph Beuys (1921-1986),¹²⁹ or one's own religious experience, as it is the case for Malevich and, with some indeterminacy, for Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). At least if one were to consider Picasso's idea of his artworks as 'fetishes'¹³⁰ on one hand and Crucifixion (1930) as a religious painting by Picasso on the other hand, one cannot but see special religious sense in Picasso's art.

124 Jean-François Lyotard (1994), Lessons on the Analytic of the sublime: Kant's Critique of judgment, sections 23-29, (tr) Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 73.

125 Ibid.

126 Robert Doran (2015), The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 164-165.

127 Boris Falikov (Борис Фаликов, 2016), ‘Astral color: Kandinsky and Theosophy (Астральный цвет: Кандинский и теософия)’ in Art Studies (Искусствознание), vol. 1-2, p. 68.

128 Pablo Bris-Marino (2014), ‘The influence of Theosophy on Mondrian’s neoplastic work’ in Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, vol. 26 (3), p. 490.

129 Mark C. Taylor (2012), Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 22.

130 Pablo Picasso (2003), ‘Discovery of African art, 1906-1907’ in Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: A Documentary History, (ed) Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, p. 33.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985)¹³¹ and Barnett Newman (1905-1970)¹³² are deeply influenced by Judaism. The same element of own religious experience can be detected in Malevich along Christianity.¹³³

If all above mentioned artists in their artworks, despite the religious differences, presuppose the absolute in the judgment of the sublime, this absolute can be taken as a relative conception different from civilization to civilization. For this it should be viewed as what is called 'the sacred' in the religious studies. The sacred, according to Carsten Colpe can be posited

as a special category of religion in the way that the correct or the true has been made a category of cognition theory, the good a category of ethics, and the beautiful a category of aesthetics. The sacred is then what gives birth to religion, in that humanity 'encounters' it; or it functions as the essence, the focus, the all-important element in religion.¹³⁴

Artists of Taiwan's Avant-garde are influenced by two such conceptions. The first is the Western absolute, which is retranslated with Avant-garde and through other moments of intercultural dialogue. The second is coming from the cultural background of Taiwanese artists. It is possible to trace how two prototypes of the sublimity, the personal God of the West and the impersonal Chinese Tian ( 天 ) influenced the most radical form of Avant-garde art, as in the case of Taiwanese reception of abstract art.

131 Marc Chagall (2003), ‘The Biblical Message’ in Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, (ed) Benjamin Harshav, Stanford:

Stanford University Press, pp. 172-173.

132 Jean-Francois Lyotard (1992), The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, (tr) Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 90.

133 Leonid Katzis (2000), ‘The Black Square by Kazimir Malevich and A Tale of Two Squares by El Lissitzky in Jewish perspective’, in Russian eschatology and literature, (ed) Leonid Katzis, Moscow: O.G.I., pp. 132-139.

134 Carsten Colpe (2004), ‘The Sacred and The Profane’ in Encyclopedia of Religion, (ed) Lindsay Jones, Thomson Gale:

Farmington Hills, vol. 12, p. 7964.

This difference seems to be the reason between the later discussed contrast between the Malevich's Black Square and Li Yuan-Jia's (李元佳) numerous artworks devoted to his 'Cosmic Point' (宇宙點).¹³⁵

Earlier it was presented how Lyotard viewed Avant-garde art as escaping the realism in art where 'realism' is understood as a presentation of stable objects from the organized cosmos. But outside of Europe things could be very different. In Daoism change prevails over permanent qualities of being, it is so in China even in mathematics.¹³⁶ Even human nature can be viewed as a ''momentary determinacy' possessed by each individual thing''.¹³⁷ How can Avant-garde art as a refutation of 'realism' come to cultures with no background of 'realism'? Commonsensical understanding of 'realism' links it to the Renaissance-like perspective and illusion of depth created on a surface. There are both practical and theoretical problems with the perspective in Western and Eastern art.

Cubists explore the way the three-dimensional world can be depicted on a two-dimensional surface. Albert Glaizes (1881-1953) and Jean Metzinger (1883-1956) dedicate artworks and theory of cubism to this problem.¹³⁸ In philosophy of art, problems of perspective and pictorial form are developed mostly in the Kantian tradition by Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) and Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968). Taiwanese Avant-garde art offers a unique opportunity for the dialogue between systems of perspective derived from the Western Avant-garde art and the perspective in Chinese art. In regard of Taiwan's Avant-garde art, three such systems can be mentioned:

135 Please, see the illustrations, and 3.3.5 for the argument.

136 Yuan Jinmei (2002), ‘Exploring the Logical Space in the Patterns of Classical Chinese Mathematical Art’ in Journal of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 29 (4), p. 520.

137 Kai Marchal and Christian Helmut Wenzel (2017), ‘Chinese Perspectives on Free Will’ in The Routledge Companion to Free Will, (eds) Kevin Timpe, Meghan Griffith, Neil Levy, London: Routledge, p. 379.

138 See Albert Glaizes and Jean Metzinger (1964), On Cubism by Gleizes and Metzingere in Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, (ed) Robert L. Herbert, New Jersey: A Spectrum Book, pp. 1-19.

1. Classical cubism rebelled against traditional illusionist perspective, known since Antiquity and elaborated in the Renaissance. Renaissance perspective has a fixed position of view, from where the illusion of three dimensions can be achieved.

2. Russian Avant-garde art draws from the Russian Icon, which has a reverse perspective. The Russian Icon also has a fixed point of view, but the icon does not create the illusion of the three dimensions, the geometry of all pictures are 'reversed' in comparison to Renaissance perspective. In Renaissance perspective all parallel lines will meet each other in a point on the two dimensional surface.

The position of the viewer is fixed next to this point. But in the icon the position of the viewer and the point of convergence of the lines coincide, as if the picture were created for the viewer from the hither side of the painting. This creates an effect of something from the depths of the icon entering the observer, an effect discussed in Russian religious thought.

3. In addition, Chinese art has its own system of perspective. This perspective is created partly due to the art form of the scroll. It is necessary to gradually unfold the scroll to see the image. Therefore the point of the viewer is not fixed, it is moving. In reality, it is the painting that is moving, not the viewer, but for the logic of perspective this does not matter.

The Russian icon influenced the Russian Avant-garde, hence one may suggest the same in the case of the Taiwan's Avant-garde art and classic Chinese art. This insight helps to understand the role of the cultural background in the globalization of the modern art as well as the problem of perspective in art in general. How does the way the world is painted correspond to the way it is viewed? For example, the Daoist view of the cosmos stresses change, while Western philosophy is more interested in permanent qualities of existence. In parallel with this, Eastern art has a floating point of view in the painting, and Western art wants the beholder to stay still in a fixed position. In this regard both Western perspectives seems to be a kind of Lyotardian 'grand narratives' which are viewed as oppressive by the philosopher. The floating point of view and especially a combination of perspectivisms have a great potential for a visual paralogy.

At the same time the collision of different perspectives creates the situation of extreme complexity. Lai Yingying (賴瑛瑛) even tries to create an approach to Avant-garde art based on this quality as the substantial one: she views Avant-Avant-garde art as Complex art (複合藝術).¹³⁹ Crowther also mentions the close idea in regard of a Kantian approach to Avant-garde art. Can something too complex be sublime? Complex things create a challenge for our senses similar to the challenges which are presented as formal demand by Kant. Our senses can be overwhelmed not only by a terrible storm or a Pyramid but also by a 4-dimensional geometric figure like a hypercube or a hypersphere.

The complexity of a hypercube should overwhelm our understanding just like a Pyramid does. In case of an artwork where different systems of perspective meet it is not just one extra dimension added. Here different relations between dimensions mix in chaos. This creates the first, the most simple level of the sublime aesthetics in Avant-garde art.

Gombrich in Art and Illusion stated that the artist presented not his view of the world but mediated it with his materials (ink in the East or tempera colors (later oil colors) in

139 賴瑛瑛(2003),台灣前衛: 六○年代複合藝術, Taibei: 遠流出版公司.

the West). The comparison of perspectives can further develop Gombrich's classical argument by showing the presence of the artist's world view in the artwork.