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Two Thousand Years of East Meeting West
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13818 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1988 |
4,650 Words |
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Stephen Addiss
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East is East and West is West, but artistically the twain have long since met. The two are now so interlocked that it can be difficult to tell which is which. Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans explore the avant-garde in London, New York, Rome, and Paris; Europeans and Americans are featured in museum exhibitions in many countries of Asia. This confluence of East and West is hardly new. Mutual artistic influences have been part of our history for more than two thousand years, but a review of the past will show that at each historical stage of the interchange deepening of understanding can be seen.
The story is full of parallels: The vogue for Oriental decorative arts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe was matched by the sponsoring of "Realist" Jesuit painters at the Chinese court and the popularity of Namban (Southern Barbarian) art in Japan. A century later, the Japonisme in France, which so influenced the Impressionists and Postimpressionists, occurred simultaneously with the acceptance of Western oil painting in China and Japan.
The twentieth century has seen another parallel: As artists in the Far East often chose an "International style" for their works, many Western artists explored the techniques and the vision behind the ink paintings, screens, and wood-block prints in Oriental traditions. As always when cultures meet, a goodly amount of mediocre art is produced, less through complete misunderstanding than through partial understanding. Nevertheless, some sparks are also created that give new and vibrant life to age-old traditions. In an age when economic and political interchanges are facts of life, an exploration of how peoples have creatively learned from each other should not be amiss.
The Western world's fascination with the Far East began at least early; at the time of Christ, when Chinese goods were carried on the Silk Route to the near East and eventually to Rome, then in its full glory. Silk was admired for its sheen, refined texture, decorative designs, combination of lightness and strength, and its sensual draping of the human figure—one Roman commentator described beautiful women, when garbed in silk, as looking as though they were naked.
The reverse influence from West to East began even earlier, due in part to the conquests of Alexander the Great, which brought elements of Classical culture to the near East and India in the fourth century B.C. One of the results of his military prowess was that Greco-Roman influences can be seen in some of the earliest images of the Buddha, created in the ancient Gandhara region of northwest India (now Pakistan). The Classical style was then transmitted throughout Asia and ultimately to China and Japan. The idealized humanism of the Buddha's face and the wave-like patterns of drapery owe much to Classical conceptions of beauty.
The next stage of mutual artistic influence was initiated by adventurers such as Marco Polo, whose seventeen-year sojourn in China in the thirteenth century inflamed the European imagination. Other travelers followed, and when Magellan circled the globe between 1520 and 1522, the artistic achievements of the entire world became at least potentially available to everyone. The growth of understanding was not rapid; artists as late as the seventeenth century, for example, did not distinguish clearly between the different cultures of Asia. Nevertheless, the appeal of the exotic was enough to inspire Chinoiserie
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