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Simply Suzhou

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-18 11:05

The best way to enjoy a garden is to pause after every few steps and take in the sight from every possible angle. Shift your vision and mentally draw a frame - or use your camera. See how easy it is to get a well-composed picture. Doorways and windowsills become frameworks for your image when you stand close. As you walk, imagine what you see as a series of still photos.

The curved pebble pathways, the meandering corridors and the sudden turns through rock passageways - all were meticulously designed to vary the view. In a sense, they are meant to obstruct you from seeing everything with one glance. In a Chinese garden, you can never capture all the scenery with one shot. In the quietness of whistling winds and chirping birds, everything runs in slow motion, so that even the smallest traces of seasonal change are perceptible.

For all the man-made hills, lakes and structures, a garden is always careful to leave space for the imagination. What I imagined most while sauntering through the Humble Administrator's Garden was the absence of swarming tourists and the presence of a few kunqu (opera) singing friends. This could be the place where the female protagonist had the lovesick dream in The Peony Pavilion; or where I suddenly started to speak in verse. It dawned on me why we do not have first-rate poets any more: They all live in apartment blocks now, from which the only view is endless rows of more apartment buildings. We are cut off from Nature, denied even a slice of it offered by a classical garden.

The Suzhou Museum, both the old and the new, stand side by side as neighbors of the Humble Administrator's Garden. The new wing, designed by I.M. Pei, started construction in 2002 and was inaugurated in 2006.

No one understands the essence of Suzhou better than hometown boy Pei. Instead of an eye-catching, crowd-pleasing structure of modernity (think of the National Theater or Bird's Nest), Pei has created something that steadfastly refuses to call attention to itself. It pays the ultimate tribute to the traditional art of Chinese aesthetics by limiting its height to that of its neighbor and employing only the essential elements found in Chinese gardens.

Yet, unlike the many new gardens sprouting in the Suzhou area, I.M. Pei's work, said to be the last from the master, is not a replica or a hodgepodge of existing gardens. It is an elevation of the highest order. Just walk in the front entrance, and you will see a pile of rocks as background. Compared with typical sculptural rocks, they are more abstract. As a matter of fact, everything in the museum has been stripped of non-essentials. In the central pond as well as the many small courtyards, decoration is so sparse and what remains is so suggestive that every "frame" you get embodies the spirit of Chinese description.

It is often believed that after the Qianlong years (1711-1799), artistic taste took a turn for the pompous. The influence of European baroque coincided with local penchant for flaunting wealth through ornate decorations and opulent architecture. In terms of garden design, the rule of "less is more" gave way to "the more the better". The mantra of spatial harmony was essentially destroyed.

Pei's museum is a throwback to the golden age when a garden was a form of art, a hint of the vast offerings of Nature, a venue for personal refinement and a shelter for spiritual purification - not a display of material cornucopia.

In Suzhou, I wish time could fly backwards and I could live in the Ming Dynasty.

 

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