An Approach to Chinese Lyric Aesthetics

As we look back into Chinese history, where sound can only be represented as words in poetry, including both acoustics and imagery, we are actually dealing with the relationship between words and images. Poetry, calligraphy, and painting, as three representational art forms in pre-modern China, have had a long history and a very complex and integral relationship within the context of Chinese aesthetics. This intricate situation stands as a significant inspiration related both to history and the phenomena of sound and visuals in contemporary Chinese art practice.

In their important study Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, Wen C. Fong and Alfreda Murck clearly articulate the special importance of the reciprocal link between image and language:

The relationship between words and images in Chinese art developed from one of complementary illustration to one of complex integration — with a major shift occurring during the late Song (1205–1279) and the early Yüan (1271–1368) painters turned increasingly to symbolism. When eventually the image became overladen with symbolic meaning, it could no longer be expressed without the help of language. (Fong and Murck 1991: xv)

This ultimate integration means words and images no longer exist without each other. Poetry, calligraphy, and painting together became a kind of mixed art form, one element always being within another. As the leading scholar-artist of the late Northern Sung dynasty (960–1127), Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101) was the first who advocated ‘poetry in painting and painting in poetry’ (ibid.: xv). Similarly, calligrapher Xie Zhiliu (谢稚柳, 1910–1997) also sees the relationship between painting and poetry as one of shared ‘visual thinking’ (ibid.: xvi).

As a fundamental issue of my research project that is discussed in this article, the question ‘how are the traditional “rules of rhythm” in Chinese aesthetics applied across contemporary creative practices in acoustic/visual space’ indicates that an essential aspect of this study is the relationship between sound and visuals in the context of Chinese aesthetics. Yet, before we investigate this integration directly, in practice, I will outline some basic historical background to Chinese aesthetics [1], as well as its relation to sound and imagery — how they are integral to understanding sound–image relationships and how they ‘replicate’ long traditions of rhythmic forms and relate these within the investigation of my own artistic work.

The pivotal issue of Chinese lyric aesthetics is an essential component of this inquiry. Much has been written about this issue and I draw from the work of Yu-Kung Kao to draw attention to specific aspects of the connections and inter-relationships between word/image — related particularly to the expressions that emerged from their performance. In this sense, I think of aesthetics as artistically integrated principles or rules that underlie the creation of various kinds of art. From these principles, the basic aesthetics underlying the creation of traditional Chinese art — especially the integration of poetry, calligraphy, and painting — can be decisively articulated.

Yu-Kung Kao states:

The Chinese aesthetic tradition, which has successively focused on music, on poetry, and then on painting, has revealed, despite the great diversity of genres and many controversies in interpretation, certain consistent characteristics that epitomize what I shall call lyric aesthetics. (Kao 1991: 47)

Yu-Kung Kao uses the term ‘lyric aesthetics’ to describe the underlying principles that are basic to all representational art, which presents a particular artform that aims to present mental images and emotional states rather than to reflect the physical world realistically. Kao continues:

How music, prose, poetry, and calligraphy were transformed for lyrically expressive ends through two essential processes. First, internalization, second, symbolization, turns signs — whether oral, written, or painted — into symbols to preserve and transmit the significance of meaningful experience. (ibid.: xvi–xvii)

Thus, in the context of lyric aesthetics, both sound and visual art forms as signs can be transformed into symbols to preserve layers of meaning. We can think of the historical progress of integration in the three art forms:

Certain simple underlying aesthetics developed into comprehensive and highly complex repertoires of artistic principles and technical rules, principles and rules that influenced and shaped almost all major art forms and artistic products in early China. (ibid.: 47)

Rather than considering the theory behind the combination of these three art forms, we need to understand the lyric aesthetics underlying this integration. In traditional China, these aesthetic principles and rules altogether are called the idea offa (法). [2] Fa here includes all of the aesthetic principles and rules of poetry and lyrics in early China. The concept of ‘rules of rhythm’ in this research is also included in fa. In other words, the ultimate research question can be understood as ‘how to apply the principles of lyric aesthetics to contemporary integrated art forms combined with sound and visual elements’.

The Relationships between Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting

In Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, Wen C. Fong and Alfreda Murck state:

No art form alone was sufficient; neither poetry nor calligraphy fit the requirement of a total art, for neither one covered a broad spectrum of form and content, and neither one encompassed all phases of the creative act. The emergence as this juncture of painting as a lyric art provided a focus for the gradual culmination of a lyric aesthetics. (Murck and Fong 1991: 82)

In the historical process of the development of Chinese art, early figure painting was a descriptive or narrative ‘image’. Painting at this stage could neither internalize nor symbolize and therefore did not fundamentally correspond to lyric principles or regulations. By the Tang Dynasty (618–907), landscape painting gradually replaced figure painting as the mainstream, while calligraphy began to profoundly influence painting. At the same time, influenced by the poetics of the time, poetry and calligraphy found their ideal forms of self-expression in the theory of painting. Du Fu (杜甫, 712–770), a poet from the Tang Dynasty, established a pattern of thinking about painting in poetic terms, which made possible the creation of an integrated poem-painting (Murck and Fong 1991: xxi). Thus, ‘literati painting’ [3] was formed. Later, as a powerful aesthetic form, literati painting recognized and elaborated the formal and symbolic qualities of brush and ink. In this process, the role of Chinese painting changed. It became one of the tools for expressing beauty in the same way as poetry and calligraphy.

One essential aspect of painting after the Song Dynasty (960–1297) was that painters would express their inner feelings through the painting of landscapes (Shanshui painting; 山水画) or flowers and birds (Huaniao painting; 花鸟画). Especially, the ‘literati painters’ explored their personal feelings in their paintings in search of self-awareness. It was only with the help of language that the personal agenda and meaning of the painting could be expressed through symbolism and personal associations, so the painters started inscribing poems intheir works. Taking Xu Wei’s [4] Ink Grapes (墨葡萄) is an example of a work in which the artist has written a poem of his own composition directly on the image, weavingtogether the three art forms (painting, calligraphy, and poetry) and evoking an integrated world for viewers to experience. In this case, the poem and its carrier, the calligraphic writing, expanded the visual world of the painting. Altogether, this artwork became a ‘space’ in which one can see and hear the poetic singing simultaneously — the simple scene of grapes is transformed into an emotional expression of the painter’s sadness and loneliness, in which the principle of lyric aesthetics is indeed represented.

The Integral Relationship between Sound and Visuals

In the Tang Dynasty, the aesthetics of the time can be expressed in two short phrases:

‘To let the mind roam between spaces’ (游心空际, you-xin kong-ji) and ‘to express ideas outside the object itself’ (写意物外, xie-yi wu-wai) […] This brings us back to the internalized world first, and then to the symbolic meaning […] This lyric experience is summed up in the formal terms of design: Pattern in space and rhythm in time. Both the fluidity of quality and the indeterminacy of interpretation are fundamentally antithetical to the rigidity of pattern and rhythm. The two phrases point to the need to create a volatile and variable world of the mind to accommodate lyrical qualities. (Kao 1991: 80)

This ‘antithetical’ combination of creative interpretation and pattern and rhythm sets the fundamental logic of this integrated art form. As a poetry–painting integration, all kinds of expressive methods can be employed to enrich the final artwork while the ultimate principles and rules underlie them. In the context of this project, we can see the rules of rhythm as the basic principles and rules, with sound and visual works being vivid expressive interpretations to accompany their fundamental logic. The intent of Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm (Liu 2022a), a sound-based multimedia spatial installation, is to bring viewers to this internalized as well as symbolized sonic–visual world with various expressive methods that can enrich each other as a whole, for an immersive spatialized sensation that is based on the logic of rhythmic patterns.

As a ‘preface’ to the more extensive and detailed examinations of the complex linkages in my performative works, Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm is both an experiment and a demonstration of the way in which, to use the French term, a ‘son image’ (or sound image) can be articulated. Yet with this as a preliminary step, it is crucial in this research to outline several particular aspects of what constitutes the marked difference between Eastern and Western cultures and to firmly establish the pivotal conceptual and historical frameworks in which my artistic research is embedded.

Chinese Pre-Modern History

China entered the twentieth century confronted by a foreign modernity rooted within a radically different pre-modern origin. Contradictions quickly emerged. The upheavals in the West’s early century were reverberating in the consolidation of the Euro–American strategic alliances as the ‘victory’ of Western hegemony. In China, there soon came decisive challenges to a ‘world order’ steeped in the social logic of the West. Reactions quickly appeared. With the May Fourth Movement (五四运动, from 1919) and the New Literature Movement (新文化运动, from 1915), key watershed moments of pre-modern and twentieth-century China, the country confronted the strained adoption of an ‘other’ modernity. The ‘reformers’ embraced a Western modernization not wholly compatible with pre-modern China. For many, this was a denial of Chinese history and a loss of its cultural legacy. It was believed that it was the only way to enter the modern age, the only opportunity to have an enlightened ‘future’. This fraught capitulation affected many generations. As a consequence, our foothold on being fully Chinese leads us to ask: where do we stand? For too long, we tentatively tried to fill this inner void with Western ideas, but it never worked.

Following the May Fourth period, intellectuals offered tangled explanations for the oversimplified, over-zealous reforms — including overthrowing Confucius and sons, the ‘reforms’ of vernacular Chinese, new poetry, the Latinization of Chinese characters, etc. One pivotal example is that classical Chinese was abandoned and vernacular Chinese became the ‘national language’. In the reformation of poetry, the reformers abandoned the classical language and the traditional rules of rhythm that came with it, advocating new poetry using vernacular Chinese with no rules. The traditional rules were broken down and overthrown as merely pre-modern. Everything from the past was wrong. This unavoidably caused a far-reaching cultural exile of the traditional Chinese language, eventually resulting in the erosion of traditional knowledge for generations to come. For the younger generations, there remains a gap between classical and vernacular Chinese. We can hardly fully understand a pre-modern China, creating a stronger feeling of being uprooted from our Chinese heritage. The question is how to make a change to prevent the homogenization of Chinese history and identity from becoming an ‘impressionistic’ pre-modernism.

With the need to achieve the agenda of establishing a modern China, to a certain extent, the May Fourth Movement occurred willingly. After the movement, on the one hand, the historical logic of Western modernization dominated the ideology of twentieth-century China. On the other hand, the traditional culture continued in daily lives, cultural memories, lifestyles, and even social structures — including poetic and artistic practices. So the historical values of Western modernization and traditional China were carried on by the Chinese successors simultaneously. Swinging between the two parallel histories, the struggle between the two was also vivid.

Reclaiming Traditional Chinese Culture

Within this struggle, another cultural movement emerged in the twenty-first century. As China finally reclaimed the space for its own development both economically and geopolitically, it started to redeem its pre-modern history. For many, this deep-rooted disregard of traditional Chinese history for almost a century was not to be continued. In the process of regaining their tradition, they rediscovered that its history was not stagnant and that the development of this culture had been evolving step by step, solidly, under Eastern-focused systems that differentiated it from the West. Therefore, the traditional history needed to be retrieved, historical knowledge restored, and historical awareness recovered.

A significant issue emerges as to how a contemporary Chinese public can conceptualize and experience pre-modern history, including the history of prior forms of artistic expression and meaning. Rather than being a historical question, this is more a realistic question for contemporary China. Traditional Chinese culture has its own vitality, balance, and inclusion. On the one hand, there were strict rules like ‘three cardinal guides and the five constant virtues’ (三纲五常). [5] On the other hand, there were also actions breaking the rules, such as the question ‘why do all the gentries have to be born with blue blood?’ (‘王侯将相宁有种乎’). This is an internal self-evolutionary characteristic of culture. ‘Tradition’ in Chinese (‘传统’) is not a word for the past, but a word for inheriting (传承) and reforming (创新). Thus, the process of reclaiming pre-modern history and rediscovering the ontology of Chinese culture is a multi-faceted task.

A vital question is how to deal with the relationship between the fully modernized and deeply Westernized contemporary Chinese society and the main body of traditional Chinese history and culture underlining this current society. Over the past years, we have seen many artworks that struggle between Western modernity and Chinese pre-modernity, of which the most iconic and famous is Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky/Tianshu (1991). This struggle is real and inescapable. Thus, if one wants to reimagine a contemporary Chinese culture, one will have to go through this struggle and find the answer. In this fashion, there is the legendary stage performance Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting (只此青绿) (2021), which was inspired by the painting A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains from the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127). There are experimental musicians who work in depth with traditional instruments, expressive methods, and artistic aesthetics, such as Tan Dun and Li Jianhong. There are definitely artists who recuperate traditional culture through the adoption and expansion of modern technology, such as the important multi-sensory visualization project 典章和韵 林壑蔚然: The Repetition Structure of the Book of Songs and the Visualization of Phonic Rhythm (2022). And this is also where this artistic research project fits in — although it is essential to acknowledge the boundaries of this practice-based research and the difficulty of reimagining Chinese contemporary art that is based on China’s indigenous cultures by reclaiming thousands of years of tradition from pre-modern history. But here I bear in mind that this project is an artistic experiment, using art-making as the ultimate methodology in an attempt to reclaim both its efficacy and potential. The project does not cover all of the history or theories from pre-modern China; it is merely one of many attempts in this field of research.

Traditional Chinese Rules of Rhythm

Traditional rhythmic rules, as aspects of aesthetics, constitute the point of entry into traditional Chinese culture. The rules of rhythm, understood in Chinese as the term 合辙押韵 (hé zhé yā yùn), are the fundamental fa or method of poeticcomposition. Deconstructing this term, 合辙 is a combination of ‘合’ (hé) and ‘辙’ (zhé). ‘合’ in this contextmeans meetinga kind of criterion, and ‘辙’ originally means ‘车辙’ or ‘rut’. This word can be understood as the rut or rules of the tones together; 合辙 means meeting the rules of using ‘平’ (píng; flat) and ‘仄’ (zè; non-flat) tones. 押韵 is combined with ‘押’ (yā) and ‘韵’ (yùn). ‘押’ in this case is the same as ‘压’, meaning ‘in control’, and ‘韵’ means ‘the rhymes’, thus 押韵 is about keeping the rhyming syllables aligned with each other. 合辙 is about the pronunciation/sound and 押韵 is about the specific forms of the rhymes themselves. Both deal with the use of sound in poetry. Thus, the singing of poetry, its tone, and its form can be understood as the most representative manifestations of the traditional rules of rhythm.

In the traditional Chinese language, characters are monosyllabic and the pronunciations of the rhymes of each specific character can be categorized into four tones: 平 (pīng) or flat; 上 (shàng) or rising; 入 (rù) or departing; and 去 (qù) or entering. These four tones can be separated into two categories: 平 (the first tone; flat) and 仄 (the other three tones) (Wang 1978: 6). These two can be roughly represented as:

• • 平: flat in traditional Chinese, including the first tone (‘ā, ō, ē’) and the second tone (‘á, ó, é’) in Pinyin. [6] 
  • 仄: rising, departing, and entering in traditional Chinese, including the third tone (‘ǎ, ǒ, ě’) and the fourth tone (‘à, ò, è’) [7] in Pinyin; the entering tone no longer exists in Mandarin.

In the composing of poetry, rhymes as well as the tones of each character are central. Those characters with the same end syllables and tones are rhymed. In the singing of a poem/lyric, the 平 (píng) tone is flat and rising and the 仄 (zè) tone is departing and entering. At the same time, the 平 tone is long and 仄 is short. This sets the basic rhythm/flow of the whole poem/lyric (Wang 1978: 6).

It is essential to know that the tones are, at the end, rhymes of a single character, not of a full word. In Chinese, one word comprises several characters. Each character has its own pronunciation and tone, which means it can be a rhyme by itself and, thus, one word can have multiple rhyming elements. This rhythmic form is different from that of Western alphabetic languages or rhyme schemes.

Moreover, it is because of the monosyllabic features of Chinese characters that the antithesis in Chinese poetry is very orderly; one character/tone matches with another. Thus, because of these symmetric features, even with only the appearance of the characters we can tell the difference of Chinese poetry from a poem in an alphabetic language (ibid.: 8).

Here is an example:

In 汉语诗律学 [Chinese Poetic Rhythm], Wang Li [8] makes the comparison in different ways by using rhymes of both Chinese and English poetry (1978: 8). This offers direct visual contrasts between the appearances/patterns of the two. In the example in his book (below), one can easily recognize the format of the Chinese poem visually, without understanding the language, and its difference compared with the English one. [9] 

The strict rules on how to place the 平 (flat) words and the 仄 (non-flat) words have been applied throughout the long history of poetry writing, in order to express a fluent rhythm for the vocal presentation. Therefore, 平仄 (píng and zè) and antithesis are essential characteristics of Chinese poetic composition. Poems and lyrics [10] following these rules will be simple to ‘read’ and sound harmonious — otherwise, they will be difficult to read and lose rhythmic nuance. The rules in this context are the rules of rhythm.

Ye Jiaying’s yinsong (吟诵) [11] 

In order to represent rhythmic patterns without consideration of the textual content, the sound works of this project also aim to make the rhymes sound more accurate. In the series of acoustic works in Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm, I adopted Ye Jiaying’s yinsong into the vocal performances of the poetry, as it appeared in her 2021 course that I took, 中华诗词 [Chinese Poetry and Lyric] (Ye 2021), in a tongue based on Mandarin [12] and combined with the tones of ancient Chinese.

In the previous section on ‘Traditional Chinese Rules of Rhythm’, I introduced the four basic tones for each character in classical poetic form. The tones identified as ‘entering’ (入) no longer exist in Mandarin. However, the ‘entering’ tone is crucial for building up the rhythm in classical poetry. It is something that cannot be absent in this work. Fortunately, there are at least two dialects still being widely used in current China that retain the most complex ‘平’ and ‘仄’ tones. These include the four basic tones and the slightly twisted ‘平’ and ‘仄’ tones, such as ‘阴平’ and ‘阳平’ (the yin and yang flat tone), ‘阴仄’ and ‘阳仄’ (the yin and yang non-flat tone), etc. They are the Yue dialect or Cantonese (粤语; which is widely used in Southern China) and the Wu dialect (吴语; which is widely used in Southeast China), both of them keeping the entering tone from ancient Chinese (Wang 1978: 5).

The singing of the poetry of Professor Ye is based on Mandarin and adopted tones from the Yue and Wu dialects, in order to mimic the tunes sung in ancient times. Therefore, in order to make the rhymes sound more accurate, the method of yinsong/singing the poems and lyrics in this project is adopted from Professor Ye.

An audio clip of Ye Jiaying's yinsong: 锦瑟 The Sad Zither  [13]