Courtyard Oracle: Beijing Oil Painter Wang Huaiqing

This paper will reflect upon how courtyard architecture contributes a symbolic character and a rich aesthetic sensibility to Chinese art and cinema. Artists such as Ai Weiwei, Wang Huaiqing, Lin Tianmiao, and filmmakers Zhang Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang, have deployed Chinese architecture--both its exterior and interior characteristics--as visual language and commentary. For Ai Weiwei and Wang Huaiqing, tables and chairs provide the impetus for engaging with history and creating novel, semi-abstract forms akin to three-dimensional calligraphy. For her “Here or There?” installation at the 2002 Shanghai Biennale, Lin Tianmiao displayed mysterious photographs of translucent figures dancing in traditional-style courtyards to the sound of a wrecking ball. In Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (1991), a courtyard house provides the setting for the gradual suffocation and confinement of a young wife. At the same time, the courtyard house in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (1993) offered refuge and stability to a family experiencing turbulent times. These historic structures--increasingly rare in situ--have nevertheless become a staple in the imagination of Chinese artists and their audiences. They live in museum settings such as the transported and reinstalled courtyard house Yin Yu Tang at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, in movie sets and collectable fragments.