Playful Revealing and Concealing in Asian Art and Culture: India, China and Japan
By Jane Cauvel
s a teacher and student of the arts and cultures of Asia, I have learned that a study of the arts is an excellent introduction to cultures vastly different from our own. Often when we approach works of art that are unfamiliar, we either impose our own categories of judgment or reject them as alien and inaccessible, instead of regarding them as an entry into the vibrant and confusing world of the art works themselves.
This latter approach imaginatively explores the aesthetic experience that a responsive beholder might be expected to have when confronting great art. Each culture has understood this experience differently: in India it is the experience of RASA, in China the experience of QI, and for Japan, YUGEN. By playing with the ideas used to describe these experiences, and by engaging the art works themselves, we begin to enter the world of these arts.
I use the idea of playing, the process of revealing and concealing, to approach the art work. Play involves imaginative and emotional speculation, going from what is known to what is unknown to unfold layers of unanticipated richness. This approach involves us in the art work, to imagine, to guess, to explore, to see and enjoy new relationships. Since all significant Asian art expresses a world of meanings, we seek those significant forms that are concealed by those that are immediately revealed.
Aesthetic theories that dominate the art of Asia include several assumptions specific to its culture. Only morally superior human beings are capable of creating great art. Such art is created for the experience of an "educated" beholder prepared to be transformed by the work. We read that the beholder must be "equal" to the work of art, many of which convey social and political messages to those who can "read" the work.
By developing one central idea in the arts and imaginatively playing with it, we discover manifestations of it in many other areas, and enter into other cultures in new and unexpected ways. We find that different mental and emotional worlds are alive and well.
INDIA: RASA AS A TASTING OR SAVORING OF EMOTIONS
The aesthetic experience characterizing great art in India is captured by the concept of RASA. It appears in the earliest Indian literature, the Vedas, as meaning "juice," "taste" and "essence." Later, both Bharata (1stc) and Abhi-nava-gupta (10c) described the essence of the aesthetic experience as RASA. What does "tasting" mean? At first the question seems easy. Tasting a work of art must mean to savor it, to play upon its surface with our eyes as if we were touching it and to imaginatively play with the images presented.But the aesthetic experience is more than visually playing with the object; it is also savoring the emotions manifested in the work of art. Emotions are the substance of art. RASA theory identifies nine basic emotions and 33 ancillary ones, and some writers have mentioned more than 100 "mini" emotions common to all human beings. In addition, RASA theory distinguishes between our ordinary and our aesthetic emotions. While ordinary emotions agitate and move us, aesthetic emotions or rasas are perceived and tasted. For example, an actor or dancer may present a dominant emotion and support it with subsidiary emotions that flesh out and intensify the dominant emotion. If done effectively, the beholder experiences a symphonic interplay of aesthetic emotions.
However, this emotional symphony will not be fully experienced unless a beholder, equal to the work, savors each of the subsidiary emotions in a prolonged, disinterested way, experiencing how each contributes to the dominant emotional quality of the work. When a Katakali dancer presents hate and revenge as the dominant emotions, each move, color, facial expression, and musical tone conveys subsidiary emotions that converge to support them. The aesthetic experience of RASA theory privileges the tactile, even when the experience is visual. Even in Darshan, the theory of religious experience that means "a direct seeing into," touch dominates.
When a devotee looks into the eyes of the statues of Shiva and comes into contact with the god inherent in the image, the devotee actually touches Shiva, and Shiva's look touches the devotee. In India, crowds of people follow images of a god paraded in a street to catch a glimpse of the god, in hopes to see and to be seen.
The Indian spiritual and material worlds are full, dynamic and virtually without empty space. Humans, animals, and plants are entities literally in touch with each other. Empty space does not exist. A trained beholder is transformed by the aesthetic experience and becomes capable of viewing the everyday world as the magnificent work of a great artist or magician who reveals and conceals new images to us daily.
CHINA: QI - THE LIFE FORCE AND POWER
The original meaning of QI is "steam arising from a pot of cooking rice." Steam offers us an image of something ethereal, spiritual, yet also material, possessing textures of warmth and fragrance. Steam moves, swirls, and seems to possess a life of its own.It is important to maintain this image to understand QI as the original cosmic energy, manifested in moral force, physical power, psychic energy and intellectual activity. Whatever QI is and however strange it may seem to Westerners, for the Chinese it is present, ready to be manifested and directed by great artists and experienced by a cultivated beholder.
The greatest task for an artist is to collect this energy, inject it and make the art work come alive with a spirit and vitality of its own. Some say it was Hsieh Ho (11c) who regarded QI as the most important element in a great painting.
An aesthetically valuable painting must exhibit technical mastery of the materials (brush, ink and paper), strict adherence to the rules of painting and accurate use of symbols. But paintings manifesting QI have something more - a life, a vitality, a spirit, a liveliness of their own. Simon Leys observes that a painting charged with QI is a sort of energy field, in which tensions are created to ensure the unity and vital dynamism of the composition.
Though the idea of QI may baffle us, it is real and powerful. Only when we experience QI do we really experience the aesthetic quality of Chinese painting. A Song Painting calls upon us to participate in its energy fields, its QI, to walk among the mountains, feel the breeze, the warmth of the air, and to experience the tensions and the harmonies.
A gentleman, or a civilized man, in the Chinese context, describes a morally superior human being. And the goal of a civilized man is to shape his life and surroundings to harmonize with the rhythms of the universe, with the forces of QI. Only through the arts and through beautiful actions and thoughts can this universal harmony be realized.
YUGEN: THE MYSTERIOUS ESSENCE OF JAPANESE ART
Like RASA and Qi, the YUGEN of Japan is a rich and pregnant concept, its many meanings interrelated to its literal meaning - "the obscure and dark." In the writings of Zeami (14th c.), Yugen "carries the connotations of half-revealed or suggested beauty, at once elusive and meaningful, tinged with wistful sadness." Others speak of YUGEN as "what lies beneath the surface," "the hint," "the subtle," "silence," "inner beauty."In medieval Japanese culture, YUGEN became the ideal for all arts and accomplishments. During this period, and to a large extent today, YUGEN captures the ideals of poetry, painting, gardens, the tea ceremony and most other aesthetic activities.
YUGEN, as half-revealed and suggested beauty, calls upon the beholder to engage in playful revealing and concealing. Do those clouds hovering over Mt. Fuji conceal it or, by suggestion, reveal it? Well, they do both. Mt. Fuji actually reveals the clouds for the clouds would not be apparent without an object to set them forth.
A trained beholder sensitive to the mystery of suggestive images wonders about the ship on the horizon: who is it carrying, where is it going and why? What is that building hidden by the fog in the mountain valley? Is it a temple or a farmhouse, or perhaps only a mirage?
The function of the arts manifesting YUGEN is to transform the beholder. A viewer must silence the mind and discipline emotions to open up in a new way to subtle images in order to become aware of the elegant beauty of simple objects and the sadness of life.
How can the sadness of life be aesthetically pleasing? Sadness comes from the awareness of the fleeting nature of living things - things are born, develop and die, leading to a kind of wistful longing for the joyous moments in this transient life to remain. The highest aesthetic experience of YUGEN takes away our day-to-day worries and egoistic concerns, and makes us aware of the transitoriness of life, hence of its fragile beauty. We find this preference for mystery, quietness, and empty space in designs of houses, food, dress, and even for appropriate behavior.
Examining the experience of a highly cultured person beholding a work of art gives us an entry into the arts of India, China and Japan.
While what is valued by these cultures differs greatly, this approach to Asian art gives us a few ways of looking at these world views. It forces us to expand the boundaries of our thought and to look at the contrasts, the exceptions and the vast variety of contradictions found in any rich culture, and certainly the cultures of Asia are extremely variable.