Thursday, July 31, 2008

中国审美:自然与法的协调 Chinese Aesthetics: The Unity of Regularity and Naturalness

中国美学中有两个看来相反但必须协调的观念:自然与法。
唐朝律诗,是要遵守许多法则的,平仄,押韵,字数行数对齐工整,等等,可是我们读诗人李白,杜甫,王维这些诗人的诗,感觉上或是自由奔放,浑成天然,或是刚雄浩大,总之是无斧凿之痕,一派自然的情态。
可见法与自然,是没有矛盾的。其实就是自然之法。自然之法是活法,不是死法。活法随时代而改变。所以不同时代的艺术家都尽情地追求他们自己的活法和创造梦想。
石涛说:“至人无法,非无法也,无法而法,乃为至法。”就是说艺人进入艺术创造的最高境界,无所束缚,可以从心所欲,不逾矩。
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Extracted from 'An Intercultural Perspective on Chinese Aesthetics' by
Karl-Heinz Pohl: Traditional Chinese poetics and art theory give weight to two seemingly contradictory notions: to naturalness (ziran) and regularity (fa).
The stunning aesthetic effect of this unity of opposites can best be observed and studied in the so-called “regular poems” (lüshi), flourishing in the golden age of Chinese poetry, the Tang dynasty (6th-10th cent. AD). These poems have to follow a strict set of rules concerning length and number of lines, tone patterns, parallelism and the like. And yet, reading the works of not only the greatest poets of that time, such as Du Fu, Li Bai or Wang Wei, one gets a feeling of absolute naturalness and ease, recalling Goethe’s dictum, that “true mastery only reveals itself in restriction” (In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister).....
The concept of unity of naturalness and regularity – in terms of following the rules of nature – was...... elaborated on by juxtaposing the notion of “living rules” (huo fa) against that of “dead rules” (si fa).....the Chinese traditional aesthetic ideal of a great work of poetry or art: that of a living, organic pattern, not dependent on rules derived from “orthodox” models or periods but following the rules of nature.
Such works come alive, creating their own rules, in each new period with each new poet-artist who is stirred by the world and its affairs. In painting, it was the influential unorthodox monk-painter Shitao (1641-1717) who pinpointed this idea with his famous notion of “no-rule” being the “ultimate rule” (wu fa er fa, nai wei zhi fa).

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