I recently had dinner with a fellow blogger, and he asked me: Why a studio?
Well the recent online edition of the China Heritage Quarterly has everything you ever wanted to know about a scholar’s studio but were afraid to ask.
For a Chinese artist, a studio name is suggestive of his or her artistic persona and the creative realm from which they draw inspiration. It is a highly personal construction of words that serves to link the artist to ideas, people or places, often in the past, but also to the present. The name can allude to a physical space such as a studio, a library or a building where the act of painting, writing or thinking happens, but equally it may just be an imaginary place or conjure a poetic sensibility expressive of the artist’s temperament.
Studio names are an integral part of the process of artistic and literary creation. They do not remain static and often shift in and out of use. Many artists and writers adopt new names to reflect changes in physical circumstances or their mental world. Many names refer to desirable human qualities that may be linked to Confucian, Buddhist or Daoist thought, such as modesty, humbleness or rusticity, or to historical or literary allusions that reveal erudition. Studio names usually appear as seals on paintings or in inscriptions on paintings and essays and may be ironic or humorous. They are often playful.
I hardly think that the name of this site reflects any great erudition. As I wrote last year, I chose Hua Gang (Granite) Zhai (Studio) for two reasons. One, I’m a native of New Hampshire (”The Granite State”). Two, the term granite (hua gang yan 花岗岩) also can mean stubborness or obstinacy to the point of stupidity. Perhaps not the most poetical or profound moniker, but I think it suits what I’m trying to do here.
The space itself can hardly match the wonderful libraries and writing rooms of China’s past. It’s a simple “Scandanavian Modern” desk, a smattering of books and reference works, and a lap top. There’s also a couple of plants and a perturbed turtle adding touches offeng shui in vain hopes of balancing the negative energy seeping from stacks of ungraded papers, endless documents in desparate need of translation and explication, and the usual deadlines, both past and present.
Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei has a wonderful post built around an article by Claire Roberts on George E. Morrison’s studio. Morrison (1862-1920) was a translator and Sinologist who had his library and work space in central Beijing, near today’s Wangfujing Street. Sadly, the building recently became a casualty of Olympic dreams, and was torn down last year in the latest paroxysm of urban renewal.
That’s the thing about studios. They aren’t physical spaces, and it is precisely this lack of physicality which gives them a timeless quality, associated in memory with work and ideas that linger long after bodies fail and buildings tumble. I can’t claim any great ideas, or even many good ones, but through the miracle of Internet caches, data-bytes , and net clusters, there is a certain immortality to blogs, even small ones such as this–as long as somebody keeps feeding juice to the machine.
Perhaps a studio isn’t such a bad name after all.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Froog // Apr 4, 2008 at 8:43 am
I am concerned about your turtle’s perturbation - but I think Perturbed Turtle might make a good band name.
2 Shu Jierui // Apr 4, 2008 at 11:03 am
Totally unrelated, but: I noticed that one of the authors of the CHQ article is John Minford, who is the son-in-law of “Brother Stone” - David Hawkes, & translator of the volumnes 4 & 5 of Hawkes’s Penguin Hong Lou Meng. It’s always been a dream of mine to meet these two men. I think you’d be interested, too, to read the notes that Hawkes kept while he was translating Hong Lou Meng. A bound version was published a few years ago by Lingnan University Press, & I’d assume they’ve got a copy or two over at BeiDa. His “zi” are incredible - all fanti. In fact, I’d say 3/4 of the notes are written in Chinese, & vertically no less. As far as I know, Prof. Hawkes has now retired from Oxford & is living in a small cottage above the sea in Wales, probably working in his own little shuzhai…
3 Bryan // Apr 8, 2008 at 1:38 am
If one feels that the some future razing of a residence of a former National Enquirer journalist is cause for mourning, then perhaps the fate of George Morrison’s studio is regretful. Yet what is shameful is that he may still be considered some kind of authority on the latter days of the Qing Dynasty. To call him a “translator and Sinologist” is a great leap since he was not only contemptuous of the Chinese, he also never learned the language. And his scribblings and posts enjoyed much convergence with those of Edmund Backhouse. A lovely pair of charletans.
4 Jeremiah // Apr 10, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Yeah, maybe I slipped on the translator part…Morrison oversaw translation projects but he himself was never really literate in the language. But I might suggest, since we are talking of studios, that he made quite a mark as a bibliophile, amassing a huge collection of Chinese works–a collection that would later form the heart of the Tōyō Bunko (東洋文庫) in Japan.
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