Kaikodo Journal XII

Scholarly Premises

Corresponding to the exhibition held between September 15 and October 13, 1999. 40 Chinese and Japanese paintings; 31 Chinese and Korean objects (71 color plates). Preface by Howard Rogers. 338 pages.

Includes the essays:
Sarah Handler:
“At a Clean Table by a Bright Window:
Furnishings in a Chinese Scholar’s Retreat”
Richard Edwards:
“Thru Snow Mountains at Dawn, Ma Yuan’s Exceptional Fuel Gatherer”
Hiram W. Woodward, Jr.:
“Is There a Shussan Shaka in the Ryoan-ji Garden?”
Arnold Chang:
“‘The Small Manifested in the Large,’ ‘The Large Manifested in the Small’: the
Connoisseurship of Chinese Painting”
Howard Rogers:
“Tung Yuan Chronicle”

The first essay is by Dr. Richard Edwards, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan and one of a handful of scholars to be credited with creating the field of Chinese painting studies in the United States. Professor Edwards has long been concerned with painting of the Southern Song era. His monograph on Li Di (Li Ti) was published in 1967 and his present essay on Ma Yuan hints at the rich harvest garnered during those years of research and thought. “Is There a Shussan Shaka in the Ryoan-ji Garden?” by Dr. Hiram W Woodward, then Curator of Asian Art at the Walters Art Gallery, poses a simple question that leads the author into fascinating speculations about inherent and significant meaning in structural patterns of paintings, gardens and temples. In this case the intentions of artists active in different media, countries, and periods of time are found to be linked by the shared religious beliefs manifested in the forms of their creations. The forms of art are also the focus of the study by Dr. Sarah Handler, formerly curator of the Museum of Classical Chinese Furniture in Renaissance, California. A specialist in furniture and the decorative arts as well as painting, Dr. Handler examines the roles played in literati culture by certain art-forms-the necessities and the playthings, as she terms them-as well as the social and cultural values assigned to these objects by the people who used and enjoyed them. Arnold Chang takes the widest view possible in his essay on connoisseurship, finding significant differences in approach between art-historian/connoisseurs on the one hand and painter/connoisseurs on the other, the former trained mainly in academic settings in the West, the latter in traditional master-disciple relationships in China. While arguing that both approaches, if applied in proper fashion with appropriate standards, should lead to identical conclusions, Arnold also finds that the differing emphases at times can lead to strikingly different results. Howard Rogers’s essay on Dong Yuan (Tung Yuan) is intended to suggest parameters of history and art-history by which the artist’s achievements may be measured and evaluated more precisely. Early source material is introduced in the belief that such evidence can be of great assistance when making critical judgments on any painter and his legacy in art.