Presence and Absence—Nature in French Landscape Garden and Chinese Garden

The history of the Enlightenment stretches back 200–300 years, and marks the beginning of modernity. The Enlightenment movement promoted freedom, democracy and equality, criticized feudal autocracy and the divine right of kings, and initiated the disintegration of religious faith, which was replaced with rational thinking and a scientific worldview. Humanity took its first steps towards practical, verifiable truth. Material productivity rapidly advanced. In modern society, the pursuit of material enjoyment, sensory stimulation, technological advancement and economic growth has become the new faith. Meanwhile, rapid technological advancement, the development of artificial intelligence and economic development have caused deterioration of the environment and brought humanity into a new crisis. When facing this conundrum, should we perhaps reexamine our lives and values? Over the past thirty years, China has rapidly transitioned from a mainly agrarian culture to a modern society. We set aside traditional values and worldviews, and as we did so, the moral relationships that maintained social order in the past disintegrated and were replaced with an individualism that places money above all else. Our material lives grew richer, but as the Chinese people cast off poverty and approached prosperity, we found anxiety, confusion and helplessness at every turn. Have our lives truly improved? These questions call for us to reexamine our worldview and our relationship with nature.

Gardens are spaces for the human spirit which embody the relationship between people and nature. In Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes, “Coming from the hand of the Author of all things, everything is good; in the hands of man, everything degenerates.” He tells us to listen to ourselves, be true to ourselves, believe in ourselves, and follow our hearts. In his novel The New Heloise, he imagined a way of coexistence between humanity and nature, where neither interfered with the other, and both grew freely. Parc Jean-Jacques Rousseau brings visitors into a dialogue with nature and with their own bodies and souls through the acts of walking, stopping, resting, thinking and getting lost. It uses the perceptions of the body to awaken self-awareness and the perceptions of the heart. Though Rousseau's garden presents the unadorned, wild beauty of nature, it is also a realm of the self. Zhuangzi proposed “carefree wandering,” forgetting the boundary between the self and the world around you to reach a state of selflessness, non-action and no ego, a state of complete detachment. People are not constrained by things because they have attained the highest state of freedom. Zhuangzi's nature is a state of following nature to gain emptiness, tranquility and lightness. Chinese gardens may have traces of artifice at every turn, but they present a state of no self, the way of nature.

Presence and Absence—Nature in French Landscape Garden and Chinese Garden uses the landscape garden as an entry point for comparing the Chinese and French views on nature as their cultures draw close to nature. Using individual cases to analyze the differences in views on nature embodied in French and Chinese landscape gardens, we have invited artists to create new works to provide audiences with unique experiences and carry out an act of self-recognition. Yang Jiechang, who lives in France, has created the Mustard Seed Garden project, which invites the audience to use a Chinese brush to create the gardens in their hearts, and practice seeing the world through patterns and relationships. This is a return to the Chinese literati values of “intention” over “form,” spirit over matter and seeing the great in the small. It promotes maintaining one’s independence in the face of temptation, getting along with oneself, and with nature, to reach a state of clarity. French artist Véronique Joumard has created a panoramic “canvas” in the exhibition space using heat sensitive material, and invites the audience to create a painting of whirling light with a touch of the hand. Fluctuations in light and air also act on small industrial parts to create a “garden” to roam in, using subtle, silent changes to awaken the sensory system that is muted in our busy lives, so that we may recognize ourselves through personal experience. People were once a part of nature. We became lost because we consciously separated ourselves from nature. Making a garden is conceptualizing the paradise in your heart and returning to your true nature, a beginning in shaping yourself through your relationships with “others.”