Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (original) (raw)

Cover: Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts by Lothar Ledderose.

Mutual combinations of the eight trigrams

result in the production of the ten thousand things.

-Shao Yong (1011-1077)

Outer Chapter on Observation of Things

The ten thousand things are produced and reproduced,

so that variation and transformation have no end.

-Zhou Dunyi (1017-1073)

Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate Explained

Lothar Ledderose

Ten Thousand Things

Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1998

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Bollingen Series XXXV:46

Princeton University Press

Princeton, New Jersey

Frontispiece Fu Shen (born 1937), Wanwu (Ten Thousand Things), March 1997. Calligraphy.

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

This is the forty-sixth volume of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The volumes of lectures constitute Number XXXV in Bollingen Series, sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ledderose, Lothar.

Ten thousand things : module and mass production in Chinese art / Lothar Ledderose.

p. cm. — (The A.W Mellon lectures in the fine arts ; 1998) (Bollingen series ; 46) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-00669-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 0-691-00957-0 (pbk : alk. paper)

1. Art, Chinese—Technique. 2. Mass production—China. I. Title. II. Series.

III. Series: Bollingen series ; 46

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The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts have been delivered annually since 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, with the goal of bringing the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts. As publication was always an essential part of the vision for the Mellon Lectures, a relationship was established between the National Gallery and the Bollingen Foundation for a series of books based on the talks. The first book in the series was published in 1953, and since 1967 all lectures have been published by Princeton University Press as part of the Bollingen Series. Now, for the first time, all the books in the series are available in one or more formats, including paperback and e-book, making many volumes that have long been out of print accessible to future generations of readers.

This edition is supported by a gift in memory of Charles Scribner, Jr., former trustee and president of Princeton University Press. The Press is grateful to the Scribner family for their formative and enduring support, and for their commitment to preserving the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for posterity.

Images in this edition may have been altered in size and color from their appearance in the original print editions to make this book available in accessible formats.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The System of Script

2 Casting Bronze the Complicated Way

3 A Magic Army for the Emperor

4 Factory Art

5 Building Blocks, Brackets, and Beams

6 The Word in Print

7 The Bureaucracy of Hell

8 Freedom of the Brush?

Notes

Bibliography

Glossary of Chinese Terms

Index

Picture Sources

Acknowledgments

as a boy, I first came across modules in the guise of a jigsaw puzzle. At one particular Christmas I was given a puzzle different from all others 1 had had so far. A chain of mountain peaks at the left flattened out toward the right into a wide plain dotted with a tower, houses, trees, carriages, and a rider. But the pieces did not have curved edges or interlocking shapes. Rather they were all simple rectangles, tall and thin, arranged in a horizontal sequence. Altogether there were only about a dozen of them. This is easy, I thought, actually, pretty boring.

Only when I took the pieces out of the box and rearranged them on the table did it occur to me that, unlike with other puzzles, there was no fixed position for each piece. The mountains could go into the middle of the landscape or to the right; the tower would as easily fit between the peaks as on the plain, and the rider could be placed heading toward the hills or returning. A coherent panorama invariably emerged.

The trick to completing this puzzle was that, on every single piece, the horizon crossed the left and right edges exactly at midpoint. The pieces could thus be put together in ever new combinations, thousands of them, yet the continuous horizon always guaranteed an intelligible composition.

This jigsaw puzzle had been made in China.

I remembered that puzzle when I studied with Vadime Elisseeff in Paris, in the 1960s. He attempted to isolate and define hundreds of distinct motifs in the endlessly varied decor of ancient Chinese bronzes. His ultimate aim was to devise a computer program that would allow him to arrange all known bronzes in one chronological sequence. We now know that this could not have worked, because the corpus of bronzes is just too complex. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by Elisseeff's premise, which he often repeated—namely that the Chinese create works of art by first defining elements, and then by playing with them.

In the 1970s I joined the research group of Suzuki Kei in Japan to work on their survey of paintings of the ten kings of hell. Minato Nobuyuki, then one of Professor Suzukis students, analyzed the ways in which the painters of these scrolls assembled their compositions from set parts. In an article on a king of hell painting in Berlin, 1 suggested that comparable modes of production might be detected in yet other areas of Chinese art.

I first systematically pursued these lines of investigation when, in the Lent Term of 1992, Cambridge University offered me the opportunity to give the Slade Lectures. At that time Jessica Rawson generously helped me sharpen my arguments and to make my English more understandable. When Ernest Gombrich once came to Cambridge, 1 mentioned to him that I was working on the issue of Versatzstücke in Chinese art. Typically, Versatzstücke refers to pieces of furniture and other set decor that can be used in a variety of ways and rearranged in many plays to create different stage sets in a theater. Gombrich told me that he knew what I had in mind, but that here existed no precise equivalent for Versatzstücke in the English language. Thus, with his blessings, I settled on module, a term that is both more understandable and more versatile.

Many institutions and individuals contributed to my further research. Unforgettable is the day when Yuan Zhongyi in Lintong descended with me into the pit of the terra-cotta army. Standing among those soldiers, 1 finally saw close up the extraordinary variety of faces, gestures, and armor that Chinese artisans had achieved more than two thousand years ago in an ingeniously devised system of modular production.

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft made possible a sabbatical term that I spent at the Freer and Sackler galleries’ marvelous research library in Washington, D.C. The unflagging support of the library staff under Lily Kecskes was invaluable, as were the many conversations with gallery staff members. Jan Stuart read several chapters as I wrote them and offered expert criticism.

A new version of my text was presented in 1998 as the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Henry Millon, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and his staff could not have made my stay more enjoyable.

The preparation of the final manuscript would have been impossible without the professional assistance of Patricia Fidler of Princeton University Press, and Brian Hotchkiss and Peter Blaiwas of Vernon Press. Judith Whitbeck graciously agreed to help with the proofreading. At the Institute of Art History of Heidelberg University, Ingeborg Klinger produced excellent photographs and Tsai Suey-ling ably compiled the glossary with the Chinese characters.

Still many other friends and colleagues helped toward completion of the work. To all of them, named and unnamed, I offer ten thousand thanks.

L.L.

Heidelberg, 1999

Introduction

THROUGHOUT HISTORY THE CHINESE HAVE produced works of art in huge quantities: a tomb of the fifth century B.C. yields bronze artifacts that total ten metric tons in weight; terra-cotta army in the third-century B.C. necropolis of the First Emperor boasts more than seven thousand soldiers; lacquer dishes manufactured in the first century A.D. have serial numbers ranging in the thousands; a timber pagoda of the eleventh century A.D. is constructed of some thirty thousand separately carved wooden members; and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries China exported several hundred million pieces of porcelain to the West.

All this was feasible because the Chinese devised production systems to assemble objects from standardized parts. These parts were prefabricated in great quantity and could be put together quickly in different combinations, creating an extensive variety of units from a limited repertoire of components. These components are called modules in the present book.

Ten Thousand Things investigates module systems in the production of ancient Chinese bronzes, terra-cotta figures, lacquer, porcelain, architecture, printing, and painting. It also explores technical and historical evolution in all these fields as well as the implications of module systems for particular makers and for society at large. Along the way, readers will discover that the West learned about modular production from China, and ultimately the definition of art in China will be addressed.

The following eight chapters present case studies that focus on particular module systems and ask similar sets of questions. The description and analysis of a given system is the main subject of each chapter. The achievement of the module system is then assessed by reconstructing the tasks that the makers were assigned or that they set for themselves. Regardless of the situation, two basic, somewhat contradictory objectives are always evident: they produce objects both in large quantities and of great variety. Taken into consideration are the the demands of notorious customers who expected high quality for a low price and thrived on setting difficult deadlines. Module systems were best suited to reach all these conflicting goals.

In roughly chronological sequence, the chapters cover a wide time span. The first case study deals with ritual bronze vessels of antiquity, particularly of the twelfth century B.C. Chapters 6 and 8, respectively, concern an encyclopedia of over one hundred million characters printed with movable type, and a series of bamboo paintings, both dating to the eighteenth century A.D.

To pursue the same issue over a period spanning three millennia, without resorting to the Hegelian concept of China as a country of eternal stasis, begs for explanation. A fundamental justification is to be found in the ubiquity of Chinese script that was in existence from at least the thirteenth century B.C. and is still in use today. Chinese script, which is arguably the most complex system of forms that humans devised in premodern times, is a module system par excellence. Its fifty thousand characters are all composed by choosing and combining a few modules taken from a relatively small repertoire of some two hundred parts.¹

Script profoundly affected the patterns of thought in China. Almost everyone had at least a rudimentary understanding of the system, as total illiteracy was rare. Most people knew a few characters, if only those used in their own names, or some numbers, and who would not recognize the characters representing happiness (fu) and long life (shou)? For the educated elite, writing was the core of culture. The decision makers spent the greater part of their formative years learning how to read and write, and then used script every day of their lives. In the course of history, knowledge of characters became ever more widespread in society. Thus, through their script, the Chinese of all periods were familiar with a pervasive module system. This system is the topic of the first chapter and a paradigm for all later discussions.

All Chinese knew about still other module systems. Probably the most popular one is the binary code expounded in the celebrated opus of divination and wisdom from antiquity, the Book of Changes (Yijing), which has been called perhaps the single most important work in China's long intellectual history.² It teaches how to build units through combinations of only two elements, a broken line and an unbroken line. There are eight different ways to arrange three lines in one group; those are the eight trigrams. By doubling the strokes into groups of six, the hexagrams, sixty-four different combinations can be formed. Further limitless transformations and changes are said to bring forth the ten thousand things, the myriad categories of phenomena in the universe.

The binary pattern of thought in the Book of Changes has fascinated intellectuals in the West from the time they first encountered it. In the seventeenth century it confirmed the expectation of the mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that China would become a major player in a global scientific academy.³

Linguists may find modular structures in the Chinese language. There is a repertoire of some 440 syllables, most of which can be pronounced in four different tones. Almost every syllable can assume various meanings. The correct meaning in a particular case derives from its combination with other syllables. Words are formed by combining syllables, not by modifying them.

Many other modular patterns can be identified in the Chinese cultural fabric. To mention but one example, a certain Buddhist rock cave, hollowed out in A.D. 616 not far from Beijing, contains four pillars with a total of 1,056 small Buddha figures carved in relief. Engraved next to each Buddha is his name, consisting of three or four characters. The same characters occur again and again, but through combination over a thousand different names are formed.⁴

Module systems do not occur in China alone; comparable phenomena exist in other cultures. However, the Chinese started working with module systems early in their history and developed them to a remarkably advanced level. They used modules in their language, literature, philosophy, and social organizations, as well as in their arts. Indeed, the devising of module systems seems to conform to a distinctly Chinese pattern of thought.

The Advancement of Modular Systems

Emphasizing the pervasiveness of modular patterns in Chinese history does not mean to deny that there have been developments and changes. Increasing standardization, mechanization, and ever more precise reproduction constitute a unifying trend. A preliminary overview reveals that advances are especially noteworthy during a few crucial periods.

The first such period came after culture in China emerged from its Neolithic beginnings into the light of recorded history. At that point, the thirteenth to twelfth centuries B.C., module systems can be identified in script, bronze casting, and architecture, although none of these systems had yet reached maturity. In script, stroke types were not yet standardized, nor were the shapes of characters, yet more than two thirds of them contain modular parts. Bronze casters deployed a module system to decorate vessels, and a technical modular system to cast them, but they did not yet make use of mechanical duplication. In architecture, a bay and a courtyard system evolved before bracketing came into use.

By the late centuries B.C., bronze casters had begun to reproduce identical parts, and they mass-produced weapons and complicated components for chariots. Makers engraved their names on their products for the sake of quality control. Builders assembled bracket clusters from standardized wooden blocks, and for the first time, script was reproduced on a flat surface. By the third century B.C., Chinese artisans had become so used to modular production that, with no precedent to which to refer, they could devise a system for a monumental task: the terra-cotta army of the First Emperor. In the same years, this emperors chancellor designed a standardized, geometrical type of script, in which almost all idiosyncrasies were eliminated.

Another seminal period was the fourth to seventh centuries A.D. Buddhist painters and sculptors produced great quantities of figures and scenes through repetitive use of readily identifiable motifs. Printing with wooden blocks, a technique that allows virtually identical reproductions in limitless numbers, was simultaneously developed. A pervasive module system of timber frame architecture was firmly established. Its crowning achievement was the design of a metropolis laid out on a modular grid, which provided a unified living space for over a million people. Script types were codified and have remained in place for over a millennium and a half. But this was also the time when systematic exploration of the aesthetic dimension of art began. Certain calligraphic pieces were the first objects brought into art collections because of their perceived aesthetic qualities, and a theoretical literature arose that espoused aesthetic values, such as spontaneity and uniqueness, in diametrical opposition to modular production.

During the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when the compass and gunpowder were invented, block-printing projects of enormous dimensions, such as the Buddhist canon, were realized. Printing with movable type was invented as well. The treatise Building Standards (Yingzao fashi) of A.D. 1103 prescribed a system for architecture in which all parts were completely and minutely standardized. Ceramic production was organized in large factories. Paintings whose compositions were built from movable parts depict Buddhist hells as bureaucratic agencies.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, industrial production became common for manufactured goods. In 1577, kilns in the city of VJingdezhen received an imperial order to deliver 174,700 pieces of porcelain. Textile factories and paper mills employed workforces of over a thousand people. An unprecedented upsurge in printing activity made books and illustrations available to a wide range of consumers. The definition of art expanded beyond calligraphy and painting to include manufactured items such as porcelains and lacquer dishes.

This was the very period when contacts between China and the West became direct and frequent, and interaction has not ceased since. During the Middle Ages, techniques of silk manufacture had already been passed from China to Europe, and when Europeans mastered the technique of printing in the fifteenth century, it helped to usher them into the modern age. Yet the great nineteenth-century sinologue Stanislas Julien still found reason to lament that the West did not learn about printing early enough. If there had been timely contacts with China, he says, many of the chef d’oeuvres of Greek and Roman literature, now irrevocably lost, would have been saved.⁵

When communications between East and West intensified, China revealed that it possessed far superior module systems. Europe learned eagerly from China and adopted standardization of production, division of labor, and factory management. By introducing machines, westerners carried mechanization and standardization even further than the Chinese, who continued to rely more on human labor, as they had traditionally done. Consequently, since the eighteenth century, Western production methods have tended to surpass those of China in efficiency.

The story has not yet ended. Perhaps the most pressing problem on the globe now is population growth. In coping with this situation, the capabilities and social virtues that the Chinese have developed over the centuries while working with module systems may, in the future, come into their own yet again: to satisfy the needs of great numbers of people who are accustomed to living in tight social structures and to minimize the use of natural resources by maximizing the input of human intelligence and labor.

Voltaire once remarked that the peoples of the East had formerly been superior, but that the West made up for the lost time to become preeminent on earth.⁶ Voltaire wrote more than two centuries ago. Perhaps he was not right. Two centuries from now we will know.

Shaping Society

Modular production shaped the fabric of Chinese society in various ways. If one were to name the single most important factor in Chinas social history, it would be the country’s achievement in supporting great numbers of people since the Neolithic age. And if one were to name the single most important driving force in Chinese social history, it might be the aim to keep these people within one unified political and cultural system. Much was done and much was sacrificed to achieve this goal.

Module systems contributed toward the task. Again, script is the paradigm. Chapter 1 argues that script was the most powerful instrument to foster cultural coherence in China, because it records the meanings of words rather than their ever-changing pronunciation. This required the creation of thousands of distinct characters, which was only possible with a module system.

Preparation of food is another paradigmatic, almost archetypal kind of production. It is the plight of humans that they have to produce food continuously. A society that has to nourish large groups of people is likely to develop elaborate and efficient methods of food production. The Chinese have excelled at this. Although it is not appropriate here to extol Chinese cuisine, there are similarities between preparing meals and making works of art: aesthetic judgment is called for on the part of the producer and taste on the part of the consumer.

Further comparison between the production of food and art was once brought home to me and my students in VJingdezhen. This city in Jiangxi Province, which was one of the greatest industrial centers in the premodern world, now produces more than one million pieces of porcelain per day. One memorable afternoon, we admiringly observed the extraordinary speed and dexterity of the ceramic workers, who kneaded the clay, brought it into cylindrical shape, cut off disks, formed them into cups, embellished them with various colors, fired them, and, after having taken them out of the kiln, added more paint over the glaze. The next morning we had breakfast in a large noodle shop. The cooks skillfully kneaded the dough, which had almost the same consistency as clay, brought it into a cylindrical shape, cut off flat slices, formed them into dumplings, enriched them with various vegetables, cooked them, took them out of the oven, and finally garnished them with a few colorful spices.

Those who frequent Chinese restaurants may have wondered how it is possible to have a menu of over one hundred different dishes, each of which usually arrives within a few minutes after having been ordered. The secret is that many menus are modular. Most dishes are combinations of ready-made parts: pork with mushrooms and bamboo sprouts, pork with mushrooms and soya sprouts, chicken with mushrooms and bamboo sprouts, chicken with mushrooms and soya sprouts, duck with mushrooms and bamboo sprouts, and so forth.

Much of what we call Chinese art today was produced in factories. This is true for artifacts in all the major materials such as bronze, silk, lacquer, ceramic, and wood. Factory production started very early in China. If a factory is defined by its systemic properties, such as organization of the workforce, division of labor, quality control, serial production, and standardization, then it is possible to speak of bronze, silk, and possibly jade factories as early as the Shang period (about 1650-about 1050 B.C.).

These factories already explored methods of mass production. When Henry Ford wrote the article on mass production for the 1947 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he defined it as the focussing upon a manufacturing project of the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, speed, and repetition.⁷ Except for power, which refers to machine power, Fords principles were probably applied in Shang factories. It might be argued that there was no large consumer market yet, and hence the early factories could not churn out large enough quantities of products to qualify as centers of true mass production. Yet it would be hard to dispute that mass production existed by the sixth or fifth centuries B.C. The most famous example is the foundry at Houma in Shanxi Province. More than thirty thousand ceramic fragments used for casting bronze vessels have been found there, and the casting process entailed mechanical reproduction of parts on a massive scale.

Because production in factories involves large numbers of participants, work tends to be compartmentalized and divided up into ever more separate steps. As a consequence, the performance of each worker becomes more regimented. Control of the workforce, of material resources, and of knowledge is a primary concern. Above the level of workers there has to be a level of managers who devise, organize, and control production. Modular production thus contributes its share toward forging and maintaining structures of an organized society, and it promotes a powerful bureaucracy.

On the consumer side, the availability of many sophisticated luxury goods, such as lacquer- and porcelain ware, pleased great numbers of people, improved the quality of their lives, and contributed to their feeling of privilege. When applied to architecture, the module system allowed timber frame buildings to be erected all over the empire, because they were adaptable to diverse climates and heterogeneous functions. Printing spread information and social values throughout the realm—quickly, cheaply, and in great quantities.

It is another asset of module systems that they allow production of objects in a hierarchy of grades. Individual ritual bronzes or sets of them can be larger or smaller, the differences can be subtle, and the grading fine-tuned. This permits the owners of these objects to define their respective social position and make it known to their peers, who will recognize the difference between ancestor halls five or seven bays wide and between dinner sets of forty-eight or eighty-four pieces.

Graded products extend the circle of participants in the system. A petty Shang aristocrat owning a few small bronzes could take pride in the fact that his vessels displayed the same kind of decor and were cast in the same technique as the gorgeous bronze sets of the mightiest ruler. A minor Qing-dynasty official serving food to his guests on porcelain plates made in VJingdezhen could relish the thought that the emperor in his palace also used dinner sets from VJingdezhen, even if those differed in decoration and quality. Modular production thus contributes to the fostering of social homogeneity and cultural and political coherence.

The system of grades has advantages for producers, too. It helps them to organize their production process and allows them to attract customers of different economic means. A workshop specializing in paintings of kings of hell that can offer a choice of sets in different sizes and with more (or fewer) figures and motifs will be able to appeal to a wide range of clients.

Yet implementing module systems also required enormous sacrifices. To mention only a few examples, for the sake of political stability the Chinese forfeited the easy way to become literate, the richness of separate national literatures, the metaphysical quality of their hells, some freedom of the painters brush, and also some aspects of what the West considers human rights. Indeed, module systems are bound to curtail the personal freedom of the makers of objects, and the owners and users. Modular systems engender unbending restraints on society.

The post and beam buildings analyzed in chapter 5 supply a metaphor of a modular society: all blocks and brackets are individually shaped, but the differences between them are small. Each block is made to fit into only one particular position in the building. The joints between the members have to be tight, because the shocks of an earthquake and the gusts of a typhoon must be absorbed and distributed throughout the entire structure. If one member does not fit perfectly, the adverse effect will multiply. If, however, every part fits well, the precarious construction will enjoy an astonishing resilience. Life is tight in module systems.

The Issue of Creativity

Permeating the concerns of this book is the issue of creativity. One basic definition of humans is that they create objects. They make pots and crossbows, timber pagodas, and mainframe computers. They make objects by certain techniques and give them certain—often very sophisticated—shapes. Manufactured objects can be measured against creations in nature. Nature is prodigious in inventing shapes, in using materials, and in devising systems of forms. Humans are hard-pressed to approach this creativity, let alone to surpass it.

When people develop systems of modular production they adopt principles that nature uses as well in creating objects and shapes: large quantities of units, building units with interchangeable modules, division of labor, a fair degree of standardization, growth through adding new modules, proportional rather than absolute scale, and production by reproduction.⁸ The first three of these seven principles are here considered to be fairly self-explanatory and therefore not given further comment, whereas the latter four principles may merit some explanation.

Standardization of units that stops short of perfect duplication is pervasive in modular production: the same decoration on the front and back of a ritual bronze vessel, upon close inspection, is bound to reveal minor discrepancies; eyebrows and beards of the terra-cotta warriors may have the same basic shape because they are formed from molds, but reworking the clay by hand has individualized them all; the prefabricated wooden blocks in the bracketing of a pagoda look totally exchangeable, but exact measuring uncovers differences of a few millimeters between each of them. The following chapters will take up these phenomena, and analyze how, in specific cases, intentional imperfections are exploited creatively. For now, suffice it to recall that this principle is well known in nature: the ten thousand leaves of a mighty oak all look similar, but exact comparison will reveal that no two of them are completely identical.

Growth in manufactured modular units happens in two ways. For a while, all modules grow proportionally, but at a certain point proportional growth stops and new modules are added instead: the animals in the decorative field of a bronze vessel will be a bit larger on a slightly larger vessel, but not exceptionally large on an exceptionally large vessel; rather, a new decorative zone will have been added. A three-bay hall may be built wider by 10 to 20 percent, but a hall that is wider still will need five bays. Zheng Xie painted clusters of bamboo leaves, say, ten centimeters in diameter in a small album. On a tall hanging scroll the clusters may average twelve or fifteen centimeters, but the painter will need many more of them to fill the composition. This is the principle of a cell growing to a certain size and then splitting into two, or of a tree pushing out a second branch instead of doubling the diameter of the first.

Reckoning with proportional rather than absolute measurements is a principle that has been applied widely and with much sophistication, especially in the field of architecture. As a rule, measurements of brackets and beams are not given in absolute terms, such as inches, but in sections. The length of one section varies according to the overall size of a building. The chapter on architecture presents evidence that the Chinese explored the principle of relative proportions in their anatomical studies. One particular text divided the total length of the body into seventy-five sections, which were then used to measure body parts. Obviously, the length of the sections varied, depending on the size of the person. The system allowed one to locate exactly the points for acupuncture on the human body, that most familiar and enigmatic creation of nature.

Reproduction is the method by which nature produces organisms. None is created without precedent. Every unit is firmly anchored in an endless row of prototypes and successors. The Chinese, professing to take nature as their master, were never coy about producing through reproduction. They did not see the contrast between original and reproduction in such categorical terms as did westerners. Such an attitude may be annoying when it comes to cloning software, but it also led to one of the greatest inventions of humankind: the technique of printing. In the Western value system, reproduction in the arts has traditionally had a pejorative connotation. Indicative, and influential in our century, has been the view of Walter Benjamin, who declared that a work of art loses its aura when reproduced by technical means.⁹ However, recent research has uncovered that in the arts of the European Middle Ages, for instance, reproduction could indeed be used as a means to define an artistic tradition, and even to reinforce the impact of specific works.¹⁰

A rich and profuse body of theoretical writings in China deals with the issue of creativity, especially in the visual arts. Invariably, the creativity of humans is described in relation to the creativity of nature, which is upheld as the ultimate model. We are told that a sage of antiquity invented script when gazing at the footprints of birds. Early treatises describe the qualities of calligraphy in terms of nature imagery such as a gentle breeze through a bamboo grove, or a phoenix soaring to the clouds. Praising an artist for his spontaneity (ziran) and heavenly naturalness (tianran), or saying that he captured life as nature does, are the highest acclaim a Chinese critic can bestow.

Artists in the Western tradition consider the emulation of nature a primary task, too, but they have been pursuing it on a different course. Beginning with the competition between two Greek painters to determine which of their paintings a viewer would more readily mistake as real, questions of realism, verisimilitude, and mimesis have stimulated and haunted Western artists down to today.¹¹

To Chinese artists, mimesis was not of paramount importance. (Only in images of the dead did they strive for verisimilitude.) Rather than making things that looked like creations of nature, they tried to create along the principles of nature. These principles included prodigious creation of large numbers of organisms. Variations, mutations, changes here and there add up over time, eventually resulting in entirely new shapes.

There seems to be a well-established Western tradition of curiosity, to put the finger on those points where mutations and changes occur. The intention seems to be to learn how to abbreviate the process of creation and to accelerate it. In the arts, this ambition can result in a habitual demand for novelty from every artist and every work. Creativity is narrowed down to innovation. Chinese artists, on the other hand, never lose sight of the fact that producing works in large numbers exemplifies creativity, too. They trust that, as in nature, there always will be some among the ten thousand things from which change springs.

1 The System of Script

A stone inscription with Chinese characters in five columns.

Fig. 1.1 Stone inscription of Lotus Hand Sutra (detail of Fig. 1.6, 14.5 x 10 cm)

In the epigrams that together serve as a motto for this book, two eleventh-century Chinese philosophers spell out some of their basic assumptions about the principles of creation: production happens by combining parts (typified by the eight trigrams), reproducing, varying, and transforming established categories of units without end. Shao Yong and Zhou Dunyi refer to creations in nature. Yet, and this is my basic thesis, when the Chinese created products in module systems, they did so along the very same principles.¹

The first module system that I will analyze is the Chinese script. Whereas each