SE Kile (University of Michigan)

The notion that gardens might offer a private space, apart from the larger public world and even family responsibilities, dates to the middle Tang (late 8th-early 9th c.). Dr. Kile’s talk offers an introduction to the first two works in the Chinese tradition to consider the making of the garden itself as an art: Ji Cheng's Yuanye (Fashioning Gardens, 1631-34) and Li Yu's Xianqing ouji (Leisure Notes, 1671). Both men create a middle category between manual laborer and garden proprietor: that of the garden designer, who, they both argue, is the true master of the garden. The work of raising garden design to the status of an expressive art, rather than mere craft, followed the model by which literati painting had been elevated in status during the Song dynasty (960-1279), when literati borrowed from theories of poetry to argue that painting, too, could express the "hills and valleys" in their hearts.