Learn from the Nature - Chinese Gardening: Artificial Nature

Learn from the Nature – Chinese Gardening: Artificial Nature

Red Brick Lecture is honored to launch “Learn from the Nature – Chinese Gardening lecture Series”. The series was initiated by Dong Yugan, the architect who designed Red Brick Art Museum, and invites Tong Ming and Ge Ming, who are also long-term researchers and practitioners of Chinese gardens, to discuss over the respective topics of the “Representing the Nature”, “Six Principles of Chinese Garden” and “Artificial Nature”; meanwhile, the three architects will jointly guide the courtyard of Red Brick Art Museum, which is one example of contemporary garden-designing.

In the series, Tong Ming, with a solid background gained in exploring Tong Jun’s Record of Jiangnan Gardens, embraces the topic of “Representing the Nature”, tracing the cultural connotation of Chinese garden to nature and illuminates the concepts and ideality of Chinese gardening which regard garden as artificiality. Ge Ming, a researcher of contemporary architecture and design, addresses the topic of “Six Principles of Chinese Garden”, probes into the techniques that can be passed on in traditional Chinese gardening. Dong Yugan, with the topic of “Artificial Nature”, takes Red Brick Art Museum as an example and summarizes the problems occurred and lessons learned in his garden-design practice.

“Ten years ago, I visited many gardens in southern China with the help my friends while I was doing my doctoral dissertation on Chinese gardens. At that time, Wang Shu held a week-long institute on garden-making every year for the students at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. I would join such institute every time. I was also invited several times by Li Xinggang and Peng Lele.to visit their studios in the south. Tong Ming in Shanghai, Ge Ming in Nanjing, Wang Xin and Wu Hongde, who were in Beijing then, would also go and we held gatherings in the gardens. The most pleasant gathering was in the Jichang Garden. Li Xinggang and I arrived first, sipping tea and chatting in the Hanbi Pavilion; later Tong Ming and Ge Ming joined us. We chatted about life and gardens. Those casual talks gradually became formalized through the annual“Tree-Stone Forum”organized by Wang Shu in Hangzhou and various seminars held by Ge Ming in the Southeast University in Nanjing. In 2007, Tong Ming, Ge Ming and I held a small seminar in the former residence of Tong Jun and the Southeast University, and later the talks were compiled and published as the book Garden and Architecture. After that, Wang Qun, who was in Nanjing then, bantered the four of us, Wang Shu, Tong Ming, Ge Ming and me, as “Four Friends of Gardens”. Thereafter, we held another seminar in the small island of the Architecture Center in Beijing University, and we agreed that we would meet again in the future. Today, in the occasion of the Red Brick Lecture, we finally get the opportunity to gather and discuss on the garden topic again.”

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Speaker: Dong Yugan
Organizer: Red Brick Art Museum

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