Lingering Garden; Man-made Serenity
Serenity, peace, mindfulness, mediation, thoughtfulness; these are all things that Chinese gardens such as the Lingering Garden, a modern-day UNESCO World Heritage Site within Suzhou, China hoped to bring to the viewer. The area was molded to be a place of silent beauty, a place where you could take in the tranquil message nature wanted to give to you. This is a place meant to display the wonders of nature yet is one of the farthest things from it. It bastardizes wilderness and shows the greed of man; greed of wanting nature only when it benefits the viewer. It is a faux natural landscape.
The Lingering Garden as well as other gardens like it have both water and rock formations. The rocks symbolize mountains, while the water symbolizes the sea. The composition of the overall garden is meant to make you ponder. You are to walk around space and view the same landscape and arrangement of objects at different angles. In this you would gain perspective and alleviate close mindedness. The rocks are sourced from various locations. Pavilions were areas of scholarly purposes, as a retreat from everyday life and business affairs. It is a place to experience the elegance of literature. It has all the makings to be seen as a natural landscape by the average viewer. From the outside it looks like a residential building that incorporated the natural beauty of the area, rather than a synthetic interpretation of what is objectively a calming environment.
Wilderness is naturally dangerous to humans. This is why people were eager to “conquer” it when us humans were far too feeble to domesticate it. With technological advancements, we have become stronger than ever. With this power we can destroy the wilderness and harness the products of its labor. Now nature is at our mercy, and with the confidence that comes from being at the top of the food chain, we select what aspects of the wilderness we keep. We cripple it, domesticate it, and keep it in our homes. This is seen in the Lingering Garden. The rocks are displaced and arranged in a way us humans find visually pleasing. When nature takes its course and it no longer becomes aesthetic, we reshape the area into a more fitting design. While it is a place of perspectives, mindfulness, and meditation, the landscape itself is boxed in and limited in nature.
While researching the Lingering Gardens, it was impossible to escape the feeling of being bombarded with advertisements, tour guides, and ticket prices. This garden was meant to express the beauties of nature and reflect the impressionism of the Ming dynasty’s literati paintings (Lingering Garden – Most Poetic and Pictorial Garden). Now it has become a site of commercialism. This does nothing but spoil the image of the garden. A place of opulent charm has been sullied by the greed of man. Can we put price tags on art, nature, or beauty? Who are we to monetize something that exists outside of our will? Is it truly ethical to harness what we believe to be aesthetic while suppressing and breaking down the aspects we believe to be ugly? Who are we to play God and inflict our will on another living organism? We paywall and gatekeep these landscapes of serenity and exclude those who cannot afford to indulge in them. We are no better than our oppressors who hide in their ivory towers of endless luxury.
In conclusion, we have created numerous landscapes similar to the Lingering Gardens. Landscapes where we impose our will onto the land. Infact this happens everywhere. We mold the environment to what we deem suitable, what is suitable to the party with the most currency to back up their motives. We have killed millions of living organisms in our conquest to domesticate nature and place it under our feet. So, whenever we declare it is no longer useful as a source of mediation and tranquility, it can be replaced. As stated before, we disable nature, tame it, and later show it off. In this process of showing, it off, we fall into the pitfalls of greed. We lose what the purpose of art is, to express a concept wholeheartedly. In hindsight, while the landscape was objectively a wonder and spectacle to see, it is now, in my eyes, polluted and contaminated by the greed of commercialism. What is a treasure on the surface, can be pulled back to reveal trash.
Work Cited
Lingering Garden, Liu Garden, Classical Gardens of Shuzou, 1 Jan. 1970, www.chinadiscovery.com/jiangsu/suzhou/lingering-garden.html.
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