Iwa ni Hana

Advertisement of "Hodohodo no Ie" from the March 2009 issue of Serai, a magazine which deals with topics such as the Noh, classical Japanese literature and the traditional fine arts. "Hodohodo no Ie" means a "so-so house". The large white caption on the upper right-hand corner says (perhaps paradoxically), "the luxury that is living with fire". I am a loyal reader of this excellent magazine and buy it every month.

When I first came across the Japanese advertisement posted on the right, the following three points were my knee-jerk reactions:

- “This looks rather like the house that the professor of German in the Kurosawa Akira’s film Madadayo (1993) lived in.”

- “Perhaps it is a modern reincarnation of Kamo no Choumei‘s ten-foot square hut?”

- “Well, what would the developers of Beijing’s Palais de Fortune say to that?”

Palais de Fortune (财富公馆), for your information, is a recently-built gated community of 172 chateaus inspired by 18th-century French architecture in general and by the palace of Versailles in particular. You may Google around for more information and have a look at this video on their official website. Many things have been said about this residential project and I have nothing to add to those – instead I would like to concentrate on the Chinese aesthetic concept of wei mei [唯美] and the Chinese conceptualization of time in artistic styles.

Being beautiful is a prerequisite to being considered wei mei, but wei mei refers to a very specific kind of beauty. It is not easy to explain in a straight forward way what it is because it has no English equivalent, though a good starting point would be to decide what it is not. “Hodohodo no Ie” for instance, would probably not be considered wei mei. Houses like that are like zen gardens in that the beauty lies in the austerity and restraint, which takes time to sink in and to reflect on. The beauty of zen gardens leaves wriggling room for argument if you just don’t “get” the austerity and restraint. Wei mei has no room for differing opinion – it s always obviously beautiful.

Features of Palais de Fortune include catering at the clubhouse, butler and maid service, enhanced security and various amenities.

Wei mei tolerates no defect, but it is far from having the same meaning as the English word “beautified” – the proper Chinese word for that would be mei hua [美化]. I think a fair distinction is that the emphasis on “beautified” is in on hiding ugliness away, whereas the emphasis on wei mei is about having everything that meets the eye look aesthetically pleasing. The two words are like the faces of Janus, bound together like Siamese twins but each looking the other way. Wei mei is complimentary and does not have the same negative connotation as “beautified” in English seem to have. 唯美圖 [wei mei tu] means an “absolutely beautiful picture”. 唯美風 [wei mei feng] means an “absolutely beautiful style”. 唯美風景 [wei mei feng jing] means “absolutely beautiful landscape”. Wei mei is absolute.

Another photo of Palais de Fortune

Wei mei is also different from its near equivalent in Chinese known as 純美 [chun mei]. Chun mei is similarly obviously beautiful but chun implies that there a quality of moral goodness or innocence. Wei mei is neutral in this regard, though it would be odd to native Chinese speakers to describe Palais de Fortune as chun mei. (On a side note, the word chun mei has been debased for quite some time by advertisers of photo albums with adult content and that chun mei xie zhen [純美寫真] nowadays usually refers photos of beautiful, naked women. However, you can still use the word chun mei to describe other things.)

So Palais de Fortune is considered to be wei mei. By way of illustration, here are some more examples of what the Chinese would typically consider to be wei mei.

1) The visual presentation of visual-kei bands. (The music is another story.)

 

The visual-kei band Versailles

2) Films such as Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (2006). You can have a look at more photos from the Chinese official website here.

Actress Zhang Ziyi in the film "The Banquet" (2006)

3) The illustrations of Eno .

An illustration by Eno.

What is considered wei mei (as you may guess by now) has nothing to do with the passage of time, which brings me back to the choice of 18th-century style architecture at Palais de Fortune. In the West, if you claim to be an artist and you paint in the style of, say, the Renaissance, you are considered to be either unoriginal or a potential forger (why else would you painstakingly learn the painting techniques and know-how of a bygone era if not forge paintings? For a deeper study on this issue, I recommend the magnificent, erudite Canadian novel What’s Bred in the Bone without reserve.) Although I sometimes wonder, must every living artist produce art like Tracey Emin just because it is the fashion?

The Chinese perspective is just the opposite – artistic styles never really go out of fashion. There is no tide of opinion to stop you from painting in any of the traditional styles that had been developed in the course of Chinese art history. Likewise, if you are an architect, there is no tide of opinion to stop you from designing houses in a style that is three centuries out of date. Palais de Fortune is just a manifestation of that hard-nosed attitude: “We like Versailles’ architecture and we have the money to build these houses. You have a problem with that?”

The collective concept of time is a fascinating element in the fabric of life. They say that living for one year in present-day China is the equivalent of living three years in the US – the turnover of changes in individual lives and in the cities are just that much greater. I remember reading a magazine from mainland China dated back in 2003 and coming across a sentence that read: “When Google was founded in the last century…” Google (as we know) was founded around 1998, and yet in the conceptualization of time as perceived by Chinese journalists, it was already “last century”. That was not the only example, I remember reading others like “in the films of Wong Kar-wai produced in the last century…” or “when Hong Kong was returned to China by the British in the last century…”

And yet no matter how frantic the pace of life is, nothing really ever goes out of fashion as far as art and aesthetics are concerned. The higher spheres of cultural life is lived as though a millennium ago just happened yesterday. That is just amazing if you take the time to think about that.