【Book and People】Jiang Xun: Letters to Young Artists

蒋勋：给青年艺术家的信

Adapted based upon an article by Yang Jian, Dec. 3, 2009

Source: Southern People Weekly Magazine

  （Taiwan edition）(mainland edition)

Letters to Young Artists 

By Jiang Xun

 May, 2009 Sanlian Publishing

 Jiang Xun (1947- ) is a well-known aesthetics scholar from Taiwan. He was born in Xi’an, and grew up in Taiwan, where he studied history and arts in Chinese Cultural University Taipei. Later on he went to Université de Paris 1972 for further research on arts. He went to Taiwan in 1976 and taught in Chinese Cultural University Taipei, Fu Jen Catholic University and East Sea University successively. In the mean time, he also served as the chief editor of Leone Fine Arts, a monthly magazine. As an arts critic, Jiang’s writings covered novels, essays, arts history and aesthetics.

A Letter to Young Artists is a book on the Chinese people’s realm of senses, including seeing, hearing, smell, taste and feeling. One could compare it with the Letters to Young Poets by Rainer Maria Rilke and In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki. In my opinion, these 3 books are equally remarkable.

Xie He (AD 470-5020, a painter in the Nan Dynasty (AD 420-589), wrote a book on paintings and graded paintings based upon the tastes and styles expressed by the paintings. On Grades of Poetry, written by literary critic Zhong Rong (AD 466-518), also rated the poems this way. In a New Account of Tales of the World (written in the 4th century AD), integrity and aesthetic tastes were the key words in grading various historical figures.

In terms of Jiang Xun‘s sensory memory, it was strikingly different at different times of his life journey. He could recall the sweet childhood, sour adolescence, and salty experiences as an army man. Generally speaking, cultures that don’t have a long history often prefer sweetness, while saltiness serves as the basis of other tastes. In today’s world, there is sufficient supply of food. Many people limited their salt intake for healthy concerns. Most people sweet less as less manual work is needed and there is little exercise, hence human body does not need that much salt. Gradually people start to forget the importance of salt.

In Jiang Xun’s opinion, it takes many years for him to gain any clue about the true tastes of his life. When Jiang was still young, he had no idea why his mother favored the bitter gourd. The bitter gourd was cut into fine cubes, quickly fried together with black, fermented bean sauce, chili oil, and bitterly salty dried fish cubes. In the kitchen, there is no escape from the haze of stinky, salty, bitter, and spicy smells, all combined in one dish. His mother invited him to try the dish for himself, and he would rather die than embracing the idea.

His mother talked about the war. She tried to escape the war with two young children. The railway station was full of refugees, desperately fighting for a chance to leave the horrifying battleground behind. Clasping two kids, no matter how hard she pushed and jostled, she could not make her way into the train. Outside the train station, dead bodied lying around, some were fragments, there were even pieces of intestines hanging on branches. Finally, she squeezed her two kids into the train through a window, and felt immensely relieved that anyhow her children would at least be safe.

After she passed away, to Jiang’s surprise, he started to fancy the taste of the bitter gourd. The bitterness lingering at the far end of his tongue reminds him of the weight of his mother’s hug at her deathbed. Comparing to this weighty, sobering bitter taste, sweetness is just too frivolous, superficial and insignificant. Tears rolling down to his lips, and he realized tears had it own taste as well. Right at that moment, Jiang started to appreciate the spiciness and bitterness remained in his mother’s mind, and what it meant for his life.   

Later on, Jiang went to Shaoxing in southeast coast of China, and found the residents there relished smelly, fermented food, such as fermented common amaranth, stinky bean curd, half-hatched stinky eggs, and fermented bean curd paste, etc. A Frenchman once told Jiang that for any ancient culture, in the end, the ultimate culinary enjoyment is the savoring of “smelly food”. So Jiang came to the conclusion that smelly food is the essence for the tastes of ancient civilization. 

Jiang’s book talks about the realm of people’s senses. In the above, we had a look on his ideas on tastes. What about the hearing?

It is said that the best material to make the ancient Qin is paulownia timber. The texture of paulownia is fine and delicate, which produces clear and melodious resonances. As the story goes, a great ancient Qin master searched for the right material to make a Qin for a long time without luck. One day, he was roaming the fields, and found a farmer burning firewood. The cracking of the burning wood startled him – it was the sound of the very finest paulownia he was looking for, and he hurried to have the fire stamped out and salvaged a block of wood, with part of the wood already being burned black. He made a great Qin out of this block of wood, and it was named charred rear Qin, to mark the scorches on the rear part of the Qin.

From this story, Jiang realized that it seemed even timber was searching for a bosom friend, a soul mate to rescue it from the cruel fate. The 8 common elements used to make musical instruments in China, including the metal, stone, silk, bamboo, water gourd, earth, leather and wood, were all out there, waiting for people with great insight to reach out to them, and become their soul mates to produce some awesome music.  

Jiang also talked about vision in his book. In his opinion, people used to look at life statically for a thousand of years, under the traditional lighting. Nowadays, our visions are tumultuous, and unfocused. There are all kinds of intermingled images in our views and we have lost the ability to “see and contemplate”. Many insects and other life forms that need to sustain and propagate in the shadows are dying out due to exposure to excessive lighting and extended lighting.

For example, extensive light pollution damages the signals sent by the firebugs and they are facing extinction as they were not able to mate. If one sits a while in a room under candle light, he/she could see that the shadowy dark room is actually full of lights, very soft, peaceful, steady and sustained lights. In such a room, one would apply extra care to write each Chinese character, and he would write slowly, in contrast to the way people write hurriedly and impatiently, when he is under very bright lighting.

A poem by Wang Wei (AD 701-741) goes like this: “straight is the lonely line of smoke above the desert vast, and round, the sun that sets upon the long river”. It inspired Jiang to believe that, only after all the visual impurities were disregarded, could we really appreciate such simple, unadorned contours and silhouettes. “This river runs beyond heaven and earth, where the color of the mountain is both is and is not”, is from another poem by Wang Wei. Following more than a thousand years of tests and tries, Chinese painters grasped the skill to take advantage of the fine differences of the ink and it made Chinese paintings looked humble, visually speaking.

Jiang believed that the Chinese developed sophisticated aesthetic views. He said that color has been a critical element for the paintings of any nations. However, since the Tang Dynasty, Chinese painters tried to forget color, and shifted from colored paintings to ink and wash painting. It applies not only to landscape painting, but also to figure painting as well. For a millennium, colorless painting has been the mainstream of Chinese painting, which is a rather striking feature when we compare it with the same art form of other nations. Once being liberated from all kinds of complicated colors, painters in the Song (AD 960-1279) and Yuan (AD 1206-1368) dynasties fell in love with “no color” paintings. More specifically, they achieved “color” from “no color” and distinguished rich colors from the black ink, understood the vitality out of the “dead standing tree” and realized there were infinite possibilities out of the “blank space” in a painting.

Regretfully, our times are featured by hustle and jostle. Jiang reminded us that in Chinese, the word “busy” means “the death of the heart”. The hearts are dying in fast-paced, jumpy urban lives, not in the small towns. If traditional age-old towns and villages are preserved near the big cities, the tense and hasty urban life could be greatly mitigated. If the stressed out urbanites could find no where to escape to from time to time, all kinds of issues will emerge in the cities sooner or later.

In modern households, there are all kinds of machines and appliances to accelerate the housework, such as the dishwashers, microwave ovens and electric ovens. The slow-paced way of life in the past has been put to an end in the pursuit of modernization. There used to be an important form of architecture in China, – the pavilions. Pavilions are places for people to stop, take a rest, and enjoy the view. There is more to life than hurrying on to reach the destination.

The pavilions are not to be seen anymore, and small towns and villages are disappearing rapidly. Our realm of senses in cities is so crowded, rugged, and hurried, where is our way out?