In Review: The Interdisciplinary prospects of reading 'Yuan ye' by Stanislaus Fung

In his essay, The Interdisciplinary Prospects of Reading 'Yuan Ye,' Stanislaus Fung seeks to free a classic text on classical gardens of its modernist moorings (rationally driven) to include a Chinese epistemological reading (phenomenologically experienced). He begins with a careful deconstruction of the treaties title, Yuan ye, literally garden smelting. Fung attributes the unfamiliar imagery in the title to the smelting of bronzes, or in fact any artistic endeavor to produce not objects of representation, a signifier for metaphysical meaning, but the actual presentation of metaphysical reality. For this purpose, Fung refers to the work of Roger T. Ames, "In our tradition [western], image in the vernacular combines the notions of perception and imagination, where the mimetic, representative, figurative and fictive connotations of image are derived from the ontological disparity between transcendentally "real" world and the concrete world of experience. The absence of such ontological disparity in the Confucian model will mean that the image is the presentation rather than the representation of a configured world at concrete, literal and historical levels."

Fung continues by expanding the reading of Yuan Ye as he dose with the treatise title, by including epistemologic differences between Modernism, Post modernist critique and classical Chinese thought in architecture and garden making (p.223). Discussions on

The essay traces broadening perspectives on garden making offered since Siren Oswald's and Maggie Keswick's primarily aesthetic considerations to more recent interests in experiential derived meaning. Discussion on differences in ways of knowing in the East and West deepened by the notions of theory and practice are especially successful in unlocking meaning in Chinese classical gardens. Fung writes that "in contrast with classical Western epistemology where 'knowing' assumes a mirroring correspondence between objective world and subjective representations, Chinese knowing is participatory, creative and performative, indicating 'an unwillingness to allow for the separation between theory and praxis and between fact and value." (p. 221).

By articulating layers of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary approaches to Yuan Ye, Fung unseats the adoption of Yuan Ye as celebrated manual for garden design. Instead, the essay invites an experiential or 'lived in' reading of the text, in keeping with its classical Chinese epistemology. The essay also takes from Augustin Berque and David L. Hall, who suggest that the phenomenological aspects imbedded in classical Chinese are alive in Post Modern view in "looking beyond the modern landscape, and proposing the 'reintegration of the worlds of art, science and morality' ." (p. 215) Ultimately, The Interdisciplinary Prospects of Reading 'Yuan Ye' not only enriches the possibilities for reading Yuan Ye, but advances the study of classical Chinese garden as a particularly fertile pursuit for not only designers in contemporary China, but a to all critics of a technologically driven world.

Stanislaus FUNG. The Interdisciplinary prospects of reading 'Yuan ye.' In Studies in the history of gardens & designed landscapes: an international quarterly. v. 18, 1998.