Aesthetics in Asia

China has a diverse and ancient tradition in aesthetics. Early in the tradition, art was integrally related with metaphysics, social and political philosophy, and ethics. At this stage in the tradition, aesthetics had primacy over rational discourse (Hall and Ames, 1987).

For Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.), ceremony and music, "conducted with style like an artistic performance," define the behavior of the Confucian gentleman (Graham, p. 11). Music (yue) comprises instrumental music, song, and dance, primarily those of the sacred rites and ceremony (li). They both arise from and produce harmony, and, by transforming the heart, transform human relations—and therefore government. For Confucius, "all government can be reduced to ceremony" (Graham, p. 13). The Mohists, in contrast, "condemned music … (re-construing morality) as a set of abstract principles" (Graham, p. 259). Xunzi (300–237 B.C.E.) and his followers developed Confucius's idea that music was beneficial (or harmful if the wrong kind) into a general theory of the moral efficacy of music. Xunzi was the first to elaborate on the relation between music and ceremony. His "Discourse on Music" begins, "Music is joy, what the authentic man inevitably refuses to do without" (Graham, p. 260). Training in music, therefore, was crucial to education and government. On this view, the sovereign could use music and ritual to enlighten his people and thereby govern well. Yet by 530 C.E. poet-critic Xiao Tong liberated aesthetics from ethics, writing that his selection for his literary anthology had been guided only by aesthetic merit, not moral considerations.

From the fifth century to the present aesthetics was dominated by the arts of the literati class—calligraphy, painting, and poetry, set in the context of natural landscapes or gardens—appreciated in the setting of natural landscapes and gardens. Three characteristics define literati arts: its amateur status as the product of scholar-officials, its function as an expressive outlet, and its style (Bush, 1971, p. 1).

The transition from political-ceremonial aesthetics to literati aesthetics of personal expression is seen in an essay attributed to the scholar Wang Wei (c. 415–443), who situated landscape painting in relation to ceremony and the cosmos:

[According to Wang Wei,] Paintings must correspond to the ba gua [the eight trigrams of geomancy], meaning that just as the ba gua are a symbolic diagram of the workings of the universe, so must landscape painting be a symbolic language through which the painter may express not a relative, particularized aspect of nature seen at a given moment from a given view point, but a general truth, beyond time and place. Though Wang Wei … is full of wonder at the artist's mysterious power of pictorial compression, he insists that painting is more than the exercise of skill; "the spirit must also exercise control over it; for this is the essence of painting." (Sullivan, p. 97)

Slightly later, Xie He (fl. 479–501) outlined six principles for judging paintings and painters that have never been superceded: (1) animation through spirit consonance (qi yun), (2) structural method (literally bone means) in the use of the brush, (3) fidelity to the object in portraying forms, (4) conformity to kind in applying colors, (5) proper planning in placing elements, (6) in copying, perpetuating the ancient models (Soper; Sakanishi; Sullivan, p. 95; Wen). Although Chinese interpretations of principles 3 to 6 diverge, they are roughly equivalent to naturalism, coloring, composition, and training.

Michael Sullivan (p. 96) explains principle 1 as follows:

Qi is that cosmic spirit (literally, breath or vapor) that vitalizes all things, that gives life and growth to the trees, movement to the water, energy to human beings, and that is exhaled by the mountains as clouds and mist. The artist must attune himself to this cosmic spirit and let it infuse him with energy so that in a moment of inspiration—and no word could be more appropriate—he may become the vehicle for its expression. Qi infuses all things, [with] no distinction between animate and inanimate. Seen in this light, the third, fourth and fifth principles involve more than mere visual accuracy; for, as the living forms of nature are the visible manifestations of the workings of the qi, only by representing them faithfully can the artist express his awareness of the cosmic principle in action. (Sullivan, 1999, p. 96; Wen, 1963)

During the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279), philosophers undertook an intellectual defense of Confucianism against the challenges of Buddhism and Daoism in the Song Synthesis. In the field of aesthetics, this culminated in a synthesis integrating literati arts with ethics, mysticism, and education in the classics that continued till the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 (Chan; De Bary, 1960, chaps. 17–19; Koller and Koller, chaps. 21–22; Black).

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) overturned the elitist literati emphasis on the classics and the value of the past. During the Republican Period (1912–1949), Lu Xun (1881–1936)—writer, activist, and founder of the Creative Print Movement—had urged artists to use art in the service of revolution (based on European ideologies). In his 1942 Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art (the foundation for Communist Chinese aesthetics until 1979), Mao adapted Lu's thinking to his revolution, acknowledging Lu as a source. Mao argued that the history of art was a product of political-economic structures that must be rejected: Bronze Age art was the product of a slave-based society, while from Han (140 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) to the twentieth century China was feudally unified under an emperor, from whom all value stemmed (McDougall). Yet Mao Zedong adapted aspects of literati aesthetics to revolutionary Communist purposes, including the use of images and texts to teach virtues and a belief in the power of art to transform the human heart and thereby political reality. In 1958 a print by Niu Wen integrated poetry into visual art—a literati concept dating from at least the Song—and peasants were adding poetry to their village murals. By the early 1960s even landscape painting in traditional media (guo hua) was adapted to Communist purposes: Huang Peimo's landscape print A Distant Source and a Long Stream (1973) incorporates the deliberate literati archaism and treatment of "empty" space literati aesthetics.

But Mao focused on the masses—both as audience and as agents of their own transformation. This required the masses to be "the sole and inexhaustible source" of subject matter, and it required a new style depicting the masses as inspiring heroes, not as agonized victims (as in Lu Xun's writings). During this time, setting the framework for aesthetic understanding and debate were praise and criticism in government-published reviews of artworks that the government established as models of art; deviation was dangerous. The impact of Jiang Qing (1914?–1991), Mao's wife and deputy director of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), is seen in her principles for "model operas" (1961–1965), codified to reform opera and all the visual arts, and in the feminist content of visual art during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

In 1953 Zhou Yang iterated Mao's advocacy of socialist realism, but declared the enrichment of Chinese tradition to be the objective of using foreign art and aesthetics. He concluded by advocating "free competition of various artistic forms" (Soviet and Chinese) and stated that Mao Zedong's guiding principle was "Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools contend."

The debates over retention of traditional aesthetics and the inclusion of foreign components within Chinese arts continue in the early twenty-first century. Debates focus on the Chinese appropriation and critique of universalizing Euro-American paradigms and meta-narratives, "culture as leisure," and the resurgence of Mao fever and neo-nationalism.