Page 24 - Tài liệu Ebook cây cảnh Bonsai and Penjing

delight visitors all summer long.
CHINA

Ancient China was a highly cultured, complex civilization with a myriad of
different aesthetic expressions, ranging from scroll painting to architecture, and
it included penjing. In the late seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries,
foreign interest in Chinese arts and goods reached a peak. It led to a fashion
trend called chinoiserie, fueled by European and North American colonists’
demand for Chinese tea, silks and decorated porcelain. The fervor for all things
Chinese included Chinese-style pavilions and pagodas, which were added to
gardens.

A Chinese blue and white hand-painted porcelain dish from 1790–1840, 4.13 x 25.08 x 20 cm,
exemplifies the idealized landscapes of the East popular in the West at that time.
After centuries of limiting commerce, the Chinese began to promote trade by
participating in world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, such as the 1876
Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia and the 1915 Panama-Pacific
World Exposition in San Francisco. War in the world and China’s own internal
turbulence prevented them from exhibiting again until the 1982 Knoxville World

Expo. After President Richard M. Nixon visited China in 1972, there was
renewed interest in Chinese arts in the United States, including public Chinese
gardens. Interestingly, Chinese gardens were created in Canada at the same time.
The Chinese art form of penjing—the art of creating miniature landscapes on
trays, sometimes with plants alone, sometimes with rocks and plants, or other
times with rocks only—may have played a role in China’s presentations at the
world’s fairs. Where it surely had an impact at an earlier time, however, was in
Japan.
Chinese Gardens in North America after 1980
1981 Astor Chinese Garden Court, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York