What are the differences between Chinese and western landscape design?

Due to different historical backgrounds and cultural traditions, Chinese and Western gardens have different styles and characteristics. Although China gardens are divided into northern royal gardens and private gardens in the south of the Yangtze River, and there are many differences, western gardens have different styles such as ancient gardens, medieval gardens and Renaissance gardens due to different historical development stages. But generally speaking, Chinese and western gardens are dominated by different philosophical and aesthetic ideas, and their forms and styles are still very distinct. Especially, the differences between Italian Renaissance gardens and French classical gardens in15 ~17th century and China classical gardens are more obvious.

Artificial beauty/natural beauty

The differences between Chinese and western gardens in form are very obvious. Western gardens embody artificial beauty, which is not only symmetrical, regular and rigorous in layout, but also square in flowers and plants, thus showing a geometric beauty. Phenomenologically, western gardening mainly uses artificial methods to change its natural state. The gardens in China are completely different, neither seeking axial symmetry nor following any laws. On the contrary, they are surrounded by mountains and waters, full of twists and turns. Not only do flowers and trees leave the original appearance of nature, but even artificial buildings try to conform to nature, uneven and strive to integrate with nature. "Although it is made by people, it is all natural."

Humanized nature/personification of nature

Because gardening is inseparable from nature, China and the West have very different attitudes towards nature. Although natural beauty is also mentioned in western aesthetic works, it is only a material or source of beauty. Natural beauty itself is flawed, and it can't be perfect without artificial transformation, that is to say, natural beauty itself has no independent aesthetic significance. Hegel once specifically discussed the defects of natural beauty in his aesthetics, because everything in nature is comfortable, and there is no conscious spiritual perfusion of life and unity of theme in some different and juxtaposed parts, so the characteristics of ideal beauty cannot be seen. "Beauty is the perceptual manifestation of ideas", so natural beauty must be flawed and cannot be sublimated into artistic beauty. The garden is man-made, and he should transform it according to his own will and recognize it, so as to achieve a perfect situation.

China people discover and explore natural beauty in another way. China people are mainly looking for something in nature that can be in harmony with people's aesthetic mood and can cause * * *. The establishment of China people's natural aesthetics can be traced back to the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties. Specific historical conditions forced the literati class to be indifferent to politics and invited them to visit the mountains and rivers, so they took "love" as the intermediary to reflect the extremely rich natural beauty contained in the lakes and mountains. Although China gardens belong to natural landscape gardens in form and style, they are not simply copying or imitating nature, but refining, abstracting, generalizing and typifying on the basis of a deep understanding of natural beauty. This kind of creation does not violate the nature of compassion, on the contrary, it conforms to nature and expresses it more deeply. It seems that China people's aesthetics does not change nature according to people's ideas, but emphasizes the emotional correspondence between subject and object, that is, "relaxing the mind". It can play the role of communication between aesthetic subject and aesthetic object. From a higher level, we can also personalize the object through the role of "empathy". Zhuangzi's "taking advantage of things" means that things and I can blend with each other, so as to achieve the state of forgetting myself. Therefore, the aesthetic thought of western gardening personifies nature, while China personifies nature.

Formal beauty and artistic conception beauty

Due to different attitudes towards natural beauty, the pursuit embodied in gardening art also has its own emphasis. Although there is no lack of poetry in western gardening, it deliberately pursues formal beauty; Although China also attached importance to the form of gardening, he devoted himself to the beauty of artistic conception. Westerners believe that natural beauty is flawed. In order to overcome this defect and achieve a perfect situation, we must rely on some ideas to enhance the natural beauty, so as to reach the height of artistic beauty. That is, a kind of formal beauty. As early as in ancient Greece, the philosopher Pythagoras explored harmony from the perspective of numbers and put forward the golden ratio. Vitruvius in Roman times also mentioned the problem of proportion and balance in his ten architectural works, and proposed that "proportion is a beautiful appearance and a moderate relationship when combining details". Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and others in the Renaissance also demonstrated the law of formal beauty through the human body. Hegel, on the other hand, took "the external beauty of abstract form" as the proposition, and abstractly summarized the laws of formal beauty such as unity, balance and symmetry, conformity with laws and harmony. So the law of formal beauty is quite common. It not only dominates the visual arts such as architecture, painting and sculpture, but also has a great influence on the auditory arts such as music and poetry. Therefore, gardens closely related to architecture are regarded as the golden rule. The symmetrical and balanced layout, exquisite geometric pattern composition and strong sense of rhythm in western gardens clearly reflect the deliberate pursuit of formal beauty.

China pays attention to "scenery" and "emotion" in gardening, and scenery naturally belongs to the category of material form. However, its standard of measurement depends on whether it can arouse people's feelings, thus having a poetic environmental atmosphere, that is, "artistic conception." This is obviously different from the formal beauty pursued by western gardening, mainly due to the cultural background of China's gardening. There were no special gardeners in ancient China. Since Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, China's gardening has been deeply influenced by painting, poetry and literature due to the intervention of literati painters. Both poetry and painting attach great importance to the pursuit of artistic conception, which makes China's gardening with strong emotional color from the beginning. Wang Guowei of A Qing Dynasty said: "Scenery is not unique, and emotion is also one of the realms in people's minds. Therefore, those who can describe the scenery and feel the truth are called the realm, otherwise they are called the realm. " Artistic conception can only be obtained through "enlightenment", which is a psychological activity. "the scenery is ruthless and the emotions are lifeless." Therefore, the essence of garden management is to pursue artistic conception.

A good garden, whether in China or in the West, is bound to be pleasing to the eye. However, due to different emphases, western gardens give us the feeling that they are pleasing to the eye, while China gardens are intended to be pleasing to the eye.

Necessity/contingency

Western gardening follows the law of formal beauty and deliberately pursues the beauty of geometric patterns, which inevitably presents a geometric relationship, such as axial symmetry, balance and the wide application of some geometric shapes, such as straight lines, squares, circles and triangles. Although the combination changes can be varied, there are still rules to follow. Since western gardening deliberately pursues formal beauty, it is impossible to violate the law of formal beauty. Therefore, all elements in the garden can not be separated from the whole, but must be embedded in a certain part with a certain shape and size, so it presents a kind of inevitability that conforms to the law.

China's gardening is far from the natural mountains and rivers, and he pursues a poetic and picturesque realm. If it also attaches great importance to landscaping, then its materials, prototypes, sources and inspirations can only be explored in nature. The more natural things are, the richer they contain. Therefore, China's gardening has great randomness and contingency. Not only is the layout ever-changing, but there is no strict subordinate relationship between the whole and the part, and the structure is loose and irregular. As the saying goes, "Gardening is omnipotent". Even many landscapes are consciously hidden, for example, "My path is winding and passes through a sheltered depression, and the meditation room is full of flowers and trees", "There is no doubt that there is another village without a road" and "The peak turns around with pavilions and wings", all of which are very poetic realms.

Compared with China and the West, western gardens show their inevitability with carefully designed patterns, while many deep and tortuous landscapes in China gardens are often unexpected and full of contingency.

Clear/fuzzy

The master-slave relationship of western gardens is clear, the key points are prominent, the relationship between each part is clear, the boundaries and spatial scope are clear, and the spatial sequence paragraphs are clear, giving people an orderly and clear impression. The main reason is that the pursuit of formal beauty in western gardens shows a regularity and inevitability by following the law of formal beauty, but anything with regularity will give people a clear sense of order. In addition, westerners are good at logical thinking and are used to analyzing things to reveal their essence. This social ideology has greatly influenced people's aesthetic habits and concepts.

China's gardening pays attention to implication, dreaminess, implication, and endless dreaminess, which is naturally caused by China people's aesthetic habits and concepts. Different from westerners, China people know things through direct identification, and think that intuition is not a direct response of the senses, but a psychological activity, which is the sublimation of internal experience and cannot be obtained through reasoning. Drawing lessons from poems and paintings, the gardening of China Gardens strives to be subtle, profound and illusory, so as to achieve the goal of seeing the big and the small, seeing the big in the small, seeing the real in the virtual, seeing the real in the virtual, or hiding or showing, or shallow or deep, thus interweaving many completely opposite factors and integrating them into one. On the contrary, it makes people feel hazy everywhere.

WTO accession/birth

In many western garden works, it is often mentioned that God built the Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve. The Garden of Eden depicted in the Bible is similar to the Fairy Mountain Qiongge imagined by China people. However, with the development of history, western gardens gradually got rid of fantasy and approached reality step by step. The classical gardens in France are the most obvious. The gardens of princes and nobles often entertain guests, hold dances and perform plays, making the garden an open-air mansion with people coming and going, bustling and lively, without seeing the transcendental illusion of paradise, and stepping into the secular world step by step.

Enjoying immortals has a far-reaching influence on ancient gardens in China. Emperors in Qin and Han Dynasties always made gardens by opening ponds and named them Penglai, Abbot and Yingzhou to symbolize Fairy Mountain in the East China Sea, thus forming a model of "one pond with three mountains". During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, due to cruel political struggles, social unrest and fragmentation. In order to save their lives, escape from reality and indulge in pleasure, the scholars in troubled times invited them to visit famous mountains and rivers, express their feelings and even live in seclusion. At this time, a negative idea of being born is bred. Tao Yuanming's Peach Blossom Garden depicts a life in a paradise. This has deeply influenced the future gardens. Scholars often feel frustrated or retire from the officialdom, so they build houses, so that they can live in poverty and be content with the status quo. Therefore, compared with western gardens, China gardens are only suitable for a few people to appreciate the taste, unlike western gardens, which can accommodate many people for public activities.

Reason/sensibility

What causes such a big difference between Chinese and western gardens? This can only be analyzed from the cultural background, especially philosophy and aesthetics. Garden art, like other arts, is influenced by aesthetic thoughts, and aesthetics grows under a certain philosophical system. Historically, both materialism and idealism attach great importance to the cognitive role of reason in practice. The Pythagorean school in the 6th century BC tried to find the factors of beauty from quantitative relations, and the famous "golden section" was first put forward by them. This aesthetic thought stubbornly ruled Europe for thousands of years. She strongly adjusts one, order, balance, symmetry and respects circles, squares and straight lines. . . . . . Wait a minute. The garden style in the form of European geometric patterns is formed under the influence of this "rationalism" aesthetic thought.

Different from the West, the classical gardens in China were bred in the fertile soil of China culture and were deeply influenced by painting, poetry and literature. Due to the direct participation and management of poets and painters, China gardens have a strong emotional color of poetry and painting from the beginning. Chinese painting, especially landscape painting, has the most direct and far-reaching influence on China gardens. It can be said that China gardens have always been developed under the background of painters' paintings. In ancient China, there was no monograph on gardening theory, but there were numerous works on painting theory. These painting theories have played a lot of guiding roles in gardening. The principle followed by painting theory is nothing more than "nature comes from the outside and the heart comes from the inside". The nature of foreign teachers refers to taking the natural landscape as the model of creation, while the internal source emphasizes that it is not the reproduction of the natural landscape by the class, but the artist's subjective feeling to extract its essence.

Apart from painting, poetry has a far-reaching influence on China's gardening art. Since ancient times, there has been a saying that poetry and painting are of the same origin. Poetry is an invisible painting, and painting is a tangible poem. The influence of poetry on gardening is also reflected in the "fate" side. Most ancient gardens in China were built by literati painters, which inevitably reflected their temperament and sentiment. As a scholar-bureaucrat class, these people undoubtedly reflected the philosophy and ethics of society at that time.

China's ancient philosophy of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism attached great importance to feelings, and the thoughts of respecting nature, escaping from reality and pursuing innocence and inaction merged together, forming a unique literati's elegant taste, romantic and elegant demeanor and unpretentious temperament and sentiment, which also determined China's aesthetic thought of "attaching importance to feelings" in gardening.