Once called paradise on earth, famous for its gardens and its exquisite silk garments, historic Suzhou is kept alive in poetry and painting. Famous examples include the 18th-century scroll ‘Prosperous Suzhou’ originally entitled ‘Burgeoning Life in a Resplendent Age.’ The painting, commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor, records life crossing the threshold into the modern age, in a traditional Chinese style that incorporates the Western perspective. Today, Suzhou is one of China’s most dynamic and rapidly developing cities. Suzhou is part of the Yangtze River Delta megalopolis, which accounts for a fifth of China’s GDP. Once known as the city of silk it has become the centre of wedding dress production, selling paradise on earth for one day, including copies of the last royal wedding dress, out of shops at the foot of mythic Tiger Hill. Suzhou is also the host of what is known as the Silicon Valley of the East. It has attracted millions of migrants searching for a better future; millions of tourists visit every year to experience the past, strolling through the gardens and courtyards of its Old Town. The contrasts could hardly be more apparent. Slow time, and fast time, and the time of the in-between, are woven into the city’s complex spatial fabric.
Three of us are on site. Two have been locked out for a year. Two have never been there. Two have left. Each of us embodies a real/virtual pandemic position in relation to Suzhou. At the same time, there, not there, never there, no longer there. While speaking from a position there, in the real/virtual city that is Suzhou past/present/future.
This is a dialogue on a city that connects us.
From small (the garden) to extra large (planetary urbanisation) From the imagined to the real and back again
The garden as a portable world
Copenhagen, UTC +2 | Tordis
I am speaking from inside a domestic courtyard located between the halls of a house in a city far away. Several courtyards and small garden-like spaces organise life within this compound which also includes a sizeable garden. They belong together, the house and garden, although they are not of the same order. The house – with its Confucian orientation – is axial, hierarchical, and somewhat symmetrical, while the garden is a Taoist space for free and easy wandering in the hills and valleys of the mind/heart. They are like two sides of the same coin – distinct but also related, in agreement but also apart, never fully revealed to each other. A wall with a gate holds everything together in one.
The garden is a miniature cosmos, a realised painting, a spatial manifestation of a way of thinking. It is human-made and, as such, artificial, yet everything inside is kind of alive. Stones, plants, soil and water with pavilions, corridors and landscaped architecture breathing the qi – that is, vital flows of energy animating things of all kinds. Here is paradise on earth – quite literally, heaven on earth pulsating from the centre of the garden-courtyard-house. The etymologies of several languages support this claim, yet what lies beyond the walls of such a place?
Other houses with several courtyards from the smallest lightwell to the almost-garden. Open spaces within and between that hold the houses together as frameworks for family life across generations. The courtyard and the garden, setting the pace of lives to the rhythms of seasons, have something in common when navigating open and closed, light and darkness, ceremony and the everyday … among myriad other things with names and without. The Chinese courtyard is a place where something appears, takes place and transforms.
Marseille, UTC +2 | Claudia
Behind the window, a girl enjoys a perfect view by looking through the clear circles that she has drawn into the transparent moisture aspirated onto the glass' surface. "Myth is close to the sacred source of language in gesture," she whispers.
A memory, a patterned view into the garden from inside a pavilion. I have not been in the garden for more than a year.
Walking down the path from the mythic mountain that is praised in ancient scroll paintings, views open up and close down. Painting and landscape merge and draw me in.
In the year 1080 of the Common Era, in a treatise entitled The Lofty Message of Forest and Streams, the painter Guo Xi stated:
You see a white path disappearing into the blue and think of traveling on it. You see the glow of setting sun over level waters and dream of gazing on it. You see hermits and mountain dwellers and think of lodging with them. You see cliffs by lucid water or streams over rocks, and long to wander there.
The garden as a portable world (pt 2)
Kuala Lumpur UTC +8 | Siti
The reach of a person can go beyond an individual’s imagination, that imagination permeates into reality, that reality is experienced and shared with others knowingly and unknowingly. What more a reach of a group of people with defined and intricate forms of cultural practices and application. A small group of people, hailing from the Northern coastal provinces of China made their journey to a South-East Asian peninsular, Malaysia. The term Sanjiang-ren was collectively used to describe these people of ancestry hailing from Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hubei and Jiangsu which includes Suzhou. Compared to other Malaysian Chinese subgroups, this is by far the smallest. Despite the number of this community, the first association was formed in Penang in 1897, named San Jiang Clansmen Association to preserve their heritage and identity in what was then a new environment. Slowly over the years, the influence of the Sanjiang-ren transcended and amalgamated into a mixture of Malaysian Culture. Its architecture experiencing perilous journeys have intercepted into many forms of the collective Malaysian architecture, settling into the tropical region surprisingly well. A space that has integrated seamlessly, adapted into the Straits Eclectic style came during the prosperous era of Georgetown, Penang between the 1840s to 1910s, is the courtyard. Upon entering escaping the sweltering tropical heat into a quiet space that adeptly and gently opens to a courtyard that embodies multiple functionalities. Acting as a communal space, skylight and ventilation, this component is embraced by the local culture and society. Beyond these practical functions, it almost acts as a conduit to an unknown, unnamed, unseen paradise. These courtyards create an ethereal boundary between the inside and outside, taking the form of miniature imitations of the natural world, connecting and celebrating the ephemeral. The space surrounded by a bouquet of tropical plants and a modest body of water creates a fissure in space to another unattainable dimension, yet it is intangibly experienced. A remnant of Suzhou’s architectural past, given new meaning and life in a new context in the Peninsular of Malaysia.
Heaven in the ground, as the heaven in the sutras.
Shanghai, UTC +8 | Yiping
Tiger Hill Pagoda, Ruiguang Pagoda, Twin Pagodas, Beisi Pagodas, and others, those ancient landmarks, still stand out and act like needles interweaving with the fabric of the canals, streets, and courtyard houses of this ancient city. They dominated the skyline of the center of Suzhou until the 1980s. The Pagodas of Suzhou are the skyscrapers of the 10th-12th centuries in this prosperous town. These multi-story buildings were dedicated to Buddhism. The monasteries are the representation of Heaven in the Buddhist sutra. Buddhism also influenced the local garden construction philosophically. Spaces were designed for intellectuals to debate, meditate, and reflect from within the "Forest and Courtyard."
The ancient temples were the public space for everyone during the festivals. Temples garden in the backyard of monasteries are also the most visited landscape sites. The surrounding areas are turned into a prosperous community of markets and residences.
The city's wealth is depicted in the elegant architectural design and craftsmanship of the monasteries, gardens, and grand residences. In the later Ming Dynasty, the flourishing of Suzhou was supported by silk and cotton textile manufacturing and by exchanges with the towns around the Taihu Basin and the Grand Canal. Those fine products circulated beyond the Yangtze Delta Region and the domestic market. International trade with Europe became common. Suzhou Code (苏州码子), a Chinese annotated number system was developed in Suzhou and widely used in China as part of this booming commercial market.
Painting as a portable garden (and the waters)
Bologna, UTC +2 | Amir
This presentation is somehow structured like a painting, or like a garden.
(Chinese) paintings are palimpsests which are enriched over time by poems, notes, comments, seals and stamps from connoisseurs, literati, poets and critics. Painters left white space on their scenes to allow for these additions over time. As Han Byung-Chul points out, a signature is not an authorial act that closes the artwork, declaring it finished, but something that opens the work for further development, as a form of dialogue. Paintings were copied several times, even adapting them over time to different styles and tastes. However, copies are considered the same artwork, works from the same painters. Chinese paintings have always been collective, participatory works.
A Painting is a portable garden. (They are literally portable, since they are made on silk scrolls, never meant to be framed or hung). There is no difference between a painting and the landscape that it is meant to represent. Like a painting, a garden is also a palimpsest, a collective work of art which changes and is enriched over time. A garden is also a copy: Suzhou private gardens are small copies of the large emperor’s hunting estates. Gardens reproduce in a small scale mountains and rivers. Their pavilions reproduce ancient architecture and buildings from far away lands. So, if a painting is a portable garden, a garden is a domestic version of the world. It is a mnemotechnic device, a theatre of the world, a time-travelling machine. A garden is a scientific tool for self-secluded knowledge workers, for the study and the observation of the world in a controlled environment.
Chinese aesthetics seems to me so close to the aesthetics of the 20th-century avantgardes, like Surrealism and Dada. Perhaps this is a bias based on my previous knowledge and perceptive habits… But after all, artistic avantgardes were directly influenced by Chinese aesthetics, that helped redefining the role of the artist and authoriship in art, and updating our perceptive habits—first and foremost, by getting rid of linear perspective.
Marseille, UTC +2 | Claudia
It was only in the 18th century that China learned of linear perspective. It is most lucidly termed 透视 tòu shì – through view. Chinese landscape paintings until then used oblique projection with shifting viewpoints, referred to with the terms 远近 yuǎn jìn – near far. The view lines point outwards, and viewpoints – shifting at short intervals – draw the viewer in again and again into a different scene. The viewer enters into relations with a new set of scenes as she or he moves along.
Landscape in painting is referred to as 山水 shān shuǐ – mountain(s) water(s) – but also as 山川 shān chuān – mountain(s) river(s). The pair of characters leaves an in-between that indicates space for agency.
London, UTC +1 | Teresa
The water location ……situated in the centre of the Yangze delta. The city lies between the great Lake Tai and the Yangtze River, a central point of the World Heritage listed Grand Canal (581–618 C.E.). This water location, on three mighty waters, meant that between the 13th and 19th centuries Suzhou was the centre of water transportation in China. The ancient town has an orthogonally designed grid that is connected to Lake Tai via a river moat that surrounds the old city forming a fortified islet. Suzhou is surrounded on all sides by a crisscross of canals. The waterways were designed with parallel streets with courtyard houses between the two. A line of halls and courtyards that connect the street to the water’s edge and floating markets would deliver directly to the houses. As China shifted from water to surface transportation, 23 of the canals were filled. The water below ground is ever present. We walked around the north west corner of the old city and counted 14 water wells within a short distance, some inside the courtyard houses and some in the streets creating mini public spaces for outdoor cooking, mini gardens and public washing.
Suzhou’s waterfront development continues…….The Jinji Lake waterfront development in the new Suzhou Industrial Park is a modern day city equivalent of the ancient city moat and marks China’s changing attitude to public space. The large open spaces designed to encourage gatherings and celebrations create a contrast to the cities walled gardens and narrow waterways. Suzhou’s new water spaces play a key role in transforming the city into a 21st century city, but are they also reinforcing the ancient identity of the water city?
Urbanisation and modernity
Suzhou, UTC +8 | Glen
Emphasizing that China is undertaking the biggest and fastest urbanization process in history has become a statement that does not necessarily explains newer issues which are unique and complex to elucidate. We might be witnessing a moment of post-urbanization in which, while the “before" and "after" are more or less defined, the in-between seems to be veiled or ignored. We can all witness the magnitude of the urbanization process, yet the gaps generated by such a jump are more difficult to define. For instance, the separation between urban and rural is often cited, yet in China, the boundary between them has become diffused; a duality that disintegrates and does not hold much meaning anymore. The same can be said about concepts like “tradition” and “modern”. They are often used for categorizing and grouping extremely vast and complex periods. Everything that happened before the establishment of the PRC seems to be labelled "traditional". We could argue that modernity is not a way of looking but a way of being: it is not found in appearances. China can look incredibly modern, yet how would one define a Chinese modernity? Suzhou can exemplify this absence of an in-between. We focus on the uniqueness and tradition of the old town (even though just a few canal streets remain), or the new developments like SIP or SND, which are far larger (and perhaps more visited) than the old town. The half-demolished in-between is ignored; a gap in the space that becomes unavoidable when we go through it, yet we forget once we reach the idealized tradition or the promising modernity. The invitation then is to look at the seams. These seams are the ones holding these different parts together, quietly shaping them and defining them. If the seams are not well resolve, what can happen to the whole outfit?
Urbanisation, planning and spontaneity
Suzhou, UTC +8 | Jiawen
Opening the long handscroll “Along the River during the Qingming Festival” by Qiu Ying, it is fascinating to compare the urban space and find similarities and differences across history. In ancient Chinese tradition, the city wall normally indicates the boundary of the city, dividing the inside and outside of the city both physically and symbolically. The painting clearly depicts a considerable market space outside the city wall as lively as that on the inside. The painting portrays clear contrasts between the places inside and outside the city: the market space outside the city wall contains denser crowds and is formed and defined by various activities in relation to transportation, commerce, and entertainment, which shows more spontaneity compared to the space inside the city wall. Insider the city, the architecture and streets are more regular, planned, and designed with purpose.
If we continue to make comparisons across history, one can find the Old Town of Suzhou, which has largely inherited its morphology from history, accommodates more spontaneous activities today. However, there was no spontaneous urbanism outside the city wall after the 1990s in Suzhou. The new development zones, including Suzhou Industrial Park and Suzhou New District, were purposefully established next to the Old Town as two wings, with the aim of preventing squatter settlements, illegal markets, and informal work. Today we generally see tradition and modernity as exemplified by Suzhou’s Old Town and the city’s new districts, respectively. Therefore I am compelled to ask: does the dislocation of spontaneous and regulated spaces indicate the dislocation of the modern and the traditional c
Manchester, UTC +1 | José
[José’s collection of quotes was integrated into the slide presentation.]
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