Hi,
I’m not quite sure what the author means by “take the long view” as it is used below. Is it referring to time or an overview of a swath of population? I’m not sure.
“But why use the oblique perspective? Some scholars believe that the Chinese convention of oblique perspective was grounded in a social convention; the desire of the emperors and the court to take a long view of the population over which they ruled. The oblique perspective promotes that sense of distance.”
In art, it wouldn’t have to be a precise and defined thing.
All “the long view” means in the picture is that all people/things in the back rows are shown just as clearly as the foreground -within reason. A blurry distance, eg a horizon, can be added on, but oblique allows objects in the distance to remain in the same size on the page as if they were in the foreground…eg it allows a whole quadrangle of a market to be clearly seen because they don’t get smaller with distance ,or they are false and not shrunk nearly as much as true.
The author also states : “The oblique perspective promotes that sense of distance.”. Does that means the Chinese artists employed the oblique perspective to create a social distance/hierarchical distance between the emperor and his subjects? I’m not sure.
davidmich
To take the long view normally means to consider, and to guided by consideration of, how things will work out (or have worked out) over a long period of time, to take account of eventual, rather than immediate consequences. Often, of course, actions have bad immediate consequences, but long-term good ones (or vice-versa).
However, it is not clear that that is what is meant in the sentence quoted in the OP. Its author may be attempting to use the idiom in a metaphorical way, to suggest that Chinese emperors deliberately tried to consider the effects of their policies on the Chinese people as a whole (perhaps over the long term, too) rather than their immediate effects on individuals. What might be bad now, for many individuals, might just be good for the people as a whole eventually (or vice-versa).
I can’t say I think the metaphor is a very good one, though. The meaning was certainly not obvious to me; it took a bit of working out, and I am far from 100% confident that I understood it aright, even now.
I found this but I don’t know if I can or should apply it to Chinese oblique-style painting, which does present an aerial view. But taoist -inspired oblique -style painting may have had a different intent.
“The aerial view is of course also a cipher for social superiority: disdain is expressed in the figure of speech “to look down upon”, a phrase that conjures the historical figure of the aristocrat in his carriage peering at the peasant, or the squire upon horseback looking at his tenant.”
Your link to the Dorrian discussion of the aerial view seems helpful here, if you ignore some of his more strained attempts to attach a multi-verse of cultural meanings to physical points of view.
To get a handle on perspective, it might be easier to start out with buildings and altitude, rather than people. If you’re standing on the ground looking at a house, you see only the face (or plane) of the house and nothing beyond it (or much on the periphery if you’re close up). When you look down at it from the top of a substantial hill, you will see a great deal beyond and beside the house, as well as still being able to see the building’s face. This hybrid of two and three dimensional representation is presumably what is meant by an “oblique view.” If you were to look directly down from an airplane, you can no long see the face of the house at all and are basically looking at it in outline form. You can “map” such features over a large chunk of territory this way, but you’re back to working in 2 dimensions.
You can pack a lot of information into an oblique view. Dorrian mentions its military utility. In architecture it would be called an axonometric view which is very useful for “visualizing” a design on paper, by essentially incorporating a quasi-third dimension, which even a standard perspective drawing lacks.
Although I can’t speak to the specific cultural implications of perspective in Chinese painting, perhaps there is a western equivalent in the 17th century engravings of major Italian villas and gardens by Giovanni Battista Falda, or Johannes Kip, whose renditions of English Country Houses and grounds were enormously popular. While these occidental examples depict extensive properties and opulent buildings (in which the figures of people are largely incidental), I imagine the concept of ownership might be a common east/west denominator. * I am the master of all I survey*, be it property in the west or people in the east? The vistas of Versailles from the palace itself, step ownership up another notch. They are an expression of royal will which explicitly imposes geometric rigor on nature itself, and does so on a massive scale. Nowhere is that mastery more evident than in an oblique perspective.
Thanks JMHanes. I would like to think that the aerial view can be interpreted as a Chinese emperor’s “master of all I survey” view of his subjects, but have not seen anything stating that in any work I’ve read so far.
davidmich
Here is the exact text using the phrase :“long view”
http://www.ski.org/CWTyler_lab/CWTyler/Art%20Investigations/ART%20PDFs/TylerChinesePerspCJP2011.pdf
Perhaps someone can tell me what is meant by it now.
“Indeed, the Chinese convention of orthographic perspective has often been interpreted as being motivated by a social convention, the desire of the emperors and the court to take a long view of the populace over which they ruled, with the use of orthographic perspective designed to promote that sense of distance. If this was the underlying logic of the Chinese painters, it implies a remarkable degree of sophistication in the understanding of perspective formalisms, and would certainly count as a ‘symbolic form’, at least in the sense of a functional artistic convention, operating in this domain of painting.”
Hope you haven’t abandoned ship here yet, David! I’ve just started in on your interesting PDF, and hope to get back to this thread tomorrow, if not tonight. I’ve recently developed a certain fascination with the court painters of Korea in the Joeson era whose detailed, visual, recordings of official events were bound into volumes for the royal library (along with even more voluminous text records). One of the most famous examples (laid out individually here), has been translated into tiles which line a small waterway in Seoul (scroll down for pix). The Joseon painters also produced more immediately relevant individual paintings, in what is presumably the Chinese style, but I thought you might enjoy these. A screen painting of the (adjacent) Changdeok & Changgyeong Palaces does seem to speak to issues of perspective, though!
I was gratified to note that my reference to axonometric views was apropos, but in trying to keep it simple, I’m afraid I ignored the key feature (parallelism) most relevant to the subject at hand! Unfortunately, the author uses the term “oblique perspective” in such a generic, technically loosey-goosey, way himself, that it’s difficult to suss out precisely what effect he’s referring to in the quoted passage.
Formally speaking, oblique and isometric projections are specific (mathematical) subsets of axonometric projections, which are in turn a subset of orthographic projections, and none of them synonymous, as the author suggests, but never mind.
On first pass, I’d have said the author seems to have it backwards when he states, “The oblique perspective promotes that sense of distance.” Creating a sense of depth and/or distance is the whole raison d’etre of linear perspective. He does not, however, seem to be talking about the illusion of distance within the painting itself, but rather the perceived distance between the painting and the viewer, who would presumably have to be an Emperor or the like, with an all-encompassing view at some unspecified remove, to make the theory work. I don’t see how that would apply to scroll paintings, in any case. The only explanatory note of sorts, seemed to be the vague proposition that linear perspective breaks down when everything you’re looking at is all far off; ergo the counterintuitive aspect of parallel perspective would necessarily make you feel more remote? That’s a serious stretch (so to speak!), although it’s certainly easier to imagine stepping right into a western style painting with that “You Are Standing Here!” quality that linear perspective sets up (an effect which was certainly deliberate in the west). It may be more difficult to place yourself in relation to what you’re looking at in a Chinese painting, but even the author puts little credence in the idea that such a phenomenon, assuming it even exists, was explicitly adopted to induce that effect. In contrast, parallel perspective is perfectly logical as a response to continuous scrolling work.
I think I should have thrown in the towel after paragraph #2, because looking back at it, I still have no clue what the author is really talking about either! I have, however, concluded that that’s his fault, not mine or yours. I enjoyed everything else about the paper though.
On another front, I think the author’s desire to defend Chinese perspective vis a vis the west leads him slightly astray in this passage:
I believe that the western departure from geometric rigor in many cases was not simply an artifact of drawing on the fly, but a deliberate artistic choice. Strict adherence to a convergence scheme can adversely effect the overall balance and weighting of different elements within the whole – a ceiling can end up dwarfing the figures below, for example, while shifting the vanishing point to correct that problem can have an equally undesirable effect on everything else. The necessary adjustments may well be done by eye, but not in an unsuccessful attempt to “approximate” the ideal perspective lines. I don’t see any equivalent basis for the shifting parallels in many of the author’s examples from China.
And with that, I’ll just tack on this multi-point perspective drawing unadorned, because I think it’s so striking and couldn’t come up with a way to tie it into the multi-perspective ‘Nymph of the Luo River.’
Thanks JM Haines for your helpful links and expansion on the topic. My focus is still on the meaning of this phrase “take the long view” as quoted above. I think it refers to time.
davidmich
In that context, I would tend to agree, because that sort of perspective is exactly what I was taught about Chinese emperors. Though, of course, it is also referring literally to what’s on the canvas, as Isilder stated and you agreed.
EDIT: This Wikipedia article on the Chinese philosophy of legalism seems to back up what I was taught, especially with the concept of shi.
