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Sur ce point, j’ai l’impression que l’aimable personne se rue tête baissée là où les anges
craignent de poser le pied, si l’on veut bien me permettre cette paraphrase de Pope.
Il se trouve que, la veille, la conférencière du Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art) nous a fait
admirer un superbe jardin Ming, dans la section du musée appelée Astor Court.
上 « au-dessus » 下 « en bas »
有 « exister » 苏 sū (州 zhōu non exprimé)
天堂 « ciel, paradis » 杭 háng (州 zhōu non exprimé)
Pavillon de la source fraîche 冷泉亭 lěngquán tíng : dans le cas présent, la photographie,
qui aplatit et limite, donne une vision plaisante, à laquelle il ne manque que l’essentiel.
Le point de vue du spécialiste ne saurait être tout-à-fait celui du profane.
Jerome Silbergeld, universitaire (Princeton) spécialisé dans l’art chinois, a publié en 2004
dans The Art Bulletin un article intitulé “Beyond Suzhou : region and memory in the gardens of
Sichuan” dont voici un extrait :
With the bringing of mountains—as stones—directly into the courtyard came the development of
an architectural array that no longer turned outward toward some borrowed scenery of distant
mountains but rather looked inward, addressing the miniature mountains close at hand. And with
an increasingly self-enclosed and inward-oriented garden, urban, small in scale, and intimate,
outer and internal walls came to matter immensely, defining space as a more complex matter
than ever before. Made semipermeable by elaborately shaped doorways and uniquely patterned
lattice windows that ultimately became a decorative end in themselves, they took a space already
small and made it even smaller in order to diversify it and thereby make it seem larger. Every
garden became a series of minigardens, each different from its minineighbors, all spatially inter-
penetrating. These gardens operated through the principles of gradual disclosure and played on
viewer expectations—anticipation and surprise, diminished and exaggerated emotions: in other
words, visual melodrama, but of an intellectually discriminating sort. A typical view revealed only
bits and pieces of a complex and convoluted world, an effect comparable to gazing through a
crystal on a world in fragments, ongoing and endless. The spatial organization dizzied the eye,
engaged the senses, and involved the mind, like the multidimensional, multimedia display of a
great Baroque cathedral—this in contrast to the Renaissance-like clarity set forth in earlier,
simpler pre-Song gardens.
Much of this sense of endless variation was created by engaging the visitor’s imagination and by
countering traditional expectations with a series of visual puns. For example: a pavilion conven-
tionally belongs in the rustic outer reaches of the garden, disclosing the semihidden pathways
and providing the tourist a prime view back toward the center of the garden. But in Suzhou’s
Garden of the Master of Fishing Nets, a pavilion is hauled back into the courtyard itself, cut in half, and
plastered up against a wall; the viewer, who expects a pavilion to facilitate a gaze down on the garden
rockery, is here dislodged, and the rockery is put in the
viewer’s place, like an icon in a temple, requiring his
obeisance. (22) The gardens of Suzhou are full of
such architect-generated surprises, more often
than not played on the theme of rockery.
[c’est moi qui souligne]
« Mais dans le jardin du Maître des filets de pêche, à Suzhou, un pavillon est ramené dans la cour
proprement dite, coupé en deux et plaqué contre un mur ; l’observateur, qui attend d’un pavillon
qu’il lui facilite la vue sur la rocaille du jardin, se retrouve évincé, et la rocaille est installée à la
place de l’observateur, telle une statue dans un temple, exigeant de lui qu’il s’incline. (22)
(22) Cette scène est justement celle qui est reconstituée au Metropolitan Museum of Art, dans l’Astor
Court, mais sans le rocher et, par conséquent, sans l’élément essentiel. » [traduction personnelle]
Cette critique a dû porter, car l’agencement initial a été modifié et l’espace vide, comblé ensuite par
une espèce de pot de fleurs, a cédé la place à un traditionnel rocher, biscornu à souhait (provenant du
lac Tai ?).
La phase « pot de fleurs », d’après Suzhou Institute of Landscape Architectural Design Co., Ltd,
partenaire chinois du Met pour la conception et la réalisation de l’Astor Court.
L’original, à Suzhou.
The landscaping along the Fishing Retreat’s west wall (opposite the pond garden doorway) and
the south wall (opposite the “Cottage to Accompany the Spring”) offer delicately balanced vistas
ideal for meditation. Visually the west side is divided into two sections. On the left, the extra-
vagantly roofed “Cold Spring Pavilion” is built over the “Azure-containing Spring.” A spectacular
rock stands within the pavilion, a dark grey three-lobed monolith from Lake Tai that possesses an
unmistakably anthropomorphic spirit. To the right of the pavilion, a tall stone marks the middle
of the west side, and beyond that, trees are planted against the wall, grassy plants grow over the
bed’s stony border, and a low, zigzag bamboo fence separates the grasses from the trees and their
underplantings.
Remarque :
« Marco Polo — rappelait Paul Demiéville (1894-1979) — fut pendant trois ans, sous le
règne de la dynastie mongole, gouverneur de Yang-tcheou [杭州], ville proche de Sou-
tcheou, sur le Grand canal, au nord-est de Nankin. »
Études chinoises, vol. XXII (2003), p. 161.