Between Fiction And Reality Plants World Of Gardens In Jiangnan Region Of Late Ming And Early Qing

This paper focuses on the time node of late Ming and early Qing and uses the plants in the Jiangnan garden as the main study objects,and investigates how the scholar stage manage a kind of “superfluous things” for admiration and playing belonging to self-cultural capital in a prevailing travelling and sightseeing social climate,so that an “elegant” trait of scholar is highlighted to differentiate the "vulgar" fashion of ordinary people in the same period who also love travelling and sightseeing.In this context,this paper will further pay attention to plant objects in garden.By analyzing the relationship between scholars and garden plants,it is found that the plants turn from a free natural thing into an artificial symbol for scholars to play under the overall taste of the scholar elegant interest and through a shaping process of the scholars,and eventually become the “superfluous things” constructed by the scholar projection of ego ideas and values in the garden world admiration and playing.Based on semiotics as the methodology,This paper investigates the formation process of scholar garden plant landscaping in the idea and practice under different fields,divides plant belonged space context into four kinds of field space: plants in scholar consciousness and intention,plants in painting theory,model books and garden painting,plants in imaginary garden,and plants in entity garden,and conducts inspection and analysis for the plant presenting meaning and structural relationships in exclusive scholar world field via four chapters.The first chapter mainly investigates the meaning and connotation of plants granted by scholars in the garden life of late Ming and early Qing,and shows the scholar social life view and value;the second chapter states the effect of ancient paintings on garden plant selection and management at the level of ideas and practices,and mainly focuses on the relationship between plants in painting and plants in garden;the third chapter uses three fictional gardens of Wuyou garden,Jiangjiu garden and Langhuan Fudi created by scholars in the late Ming and early Qing as objects,discusses plants in the fictional gardens at the imaginary level to peep the artistic interests and ideals of scholars in Ming and Qing dynasties,and tries to explore the structured and modular garden ideas in the scholar thought by analyzing the three fictional gardens;and the fourth chapter mainly discusses the relationships and implications between plants in real gardens and poetry,and conducts a slight analysis on the symbolic nature of garden plants,as well as garden language system slightly.The garden plants are analyzed at four practical levels of consciousness,paintings,imagination and poetry.The paper will explore how Jiangnan scholars manage their elegant living world in the major political,social and cultural transformation nodes of late Ming and early Qing.