Although we’re sure the interview was partly lost in translation, here’s the part that we were able to recover.
Zhao Qingquan is the vice-president of the Association of Penjing Artists of China and an internationally acclaimed penjing master for several decades. We met Zhao Qingquan in Penjing museum of the Slender West Lake garden in, which he directs. Many of China’s famous penjings are kept, maintained and exhibited here. On a foggy Sunday morning, we walk to a modern Chinese building in the middle of the vast park on the outskirts of the city.
Zhao grew up in a family full of penjing. His father and grandfather both liked to make them and Zhao started playing with penjing when he was 9 or 10 years old. “But it was only when I grew up and studied, years ago, that I took penjing as my profession.” It’s very important to him, because it’s not only his job and career, but also his hobby: “I think that human energy is limited, so to free myself, I have to put the limited energy into the limited career. So I took penjing as my career and I can get fully devoted to that career.”
Travelling the world for his profession for years, Zhao recognizes the growing number of people who like penjing. He explains: “I think the best reason is that human beings come from nature. But since the process of modernization, people get far away from nature.” The focus on the natural, or the landscape, is historically embedded in Chinese culture: “There was a special class of people in China who studied to become an officer in the government. We call them scholars, or poets. These people put their ideas about society in their work. During the Jin Dynasty (1600 years ago), it wasn’t easy to become an officer. You had to bribe somebody to get the position. Dissatisfied about society, these scholars escaped to settle down in a forest or a place, which had beautiful scenery. They put their dissatisfaction in a poem, a painting or the design of a garden.”
Zhao explains he developed his personal style the same way as the scholars developed their poetry or paintings. He puts a lot of emphasis on his environment in his work: “Yangzhou is a city with 2500 years of history and a lively local culture. It really influenced me a lot.” He made two kinds of innovations: “One is that my work must be poetic. In the old China, poetry could embody a lot of things. The same way, I want my audience to see and imagine more than the penjing.” He wants to instil empathy in his audience: “A forest might occur to them, or they might even imagine they lived in a forest once. The way you look at trees will remind you of your happy life and make you experience it again.” But Zhao wants to do more: “My work has to be picturalistic as well. Where in the west, the emphasis in painting is on the human being; in China we pay our attention to the mountains, the water, the river and the tree. Penjing is like a painting of this landscape in three dimensions.” All in all, his work needs to embed his ideal: “That is the function and also my expectation to my work.”
When asked, Zhao replies that society is the most important factor in his work. After that comes culture and after that comes nature: “When I went to Canada, I saw penjing which had very thin trunks and branches, erected to the sky. Their leaves were growing downwards. I found that very strange. The same way you might think we have very strange forms of penjing, but they are based on our natural environment. It’s about looking at something as ordinary as nature.”