New Faculty: Pauline Lin Investigates
the Origins of Landscape Culture in China
There's little doubt that Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies Pauline Lin has chosen the right profession. When asked about her current research, an interdisciplinary study focusing on landscape culture in the third-century Chinese capital of Ye, she says, "It hardly feels like work — reading books and looking at pictures." She has always loved reading and looking at artworks, she says, and she enjoys sharing their pleasures with students. But Lin's eye penetrates deep beneath the surface of the landscape literature and art she so enjoys.
Before joining Bryn Mawr's East Asian Studies Department last fall, Lin taught at Wesleyan College and Yale University and was a fellow at the Institute of Connoisseurship in Chinese Painting and Calligraphy at the Smithsonian Institution's Sackler and Freer Galleries in Washington, D.C. She spent her career as a student at Harvard University, earning an A.B. in literature and an M.A. and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. She sees herself as part of a new generation of East Asian scholars who combine rigorous philological training with an interdisciplinary approach.
"For some time, the study of Chinese literature in the West has been deeply influenced by Western literary theory," she contends. "While the rigorous questioning that informs literary studies is still important, we are now turning back to the original sources, to see what types of questions these texts and artifacts pose and what they can tell us about culture and tradition." Thus, this generation of Sinological scholars has turned back to methodical philological studies, exploring commentaries, textual editions, discovering lost texts through extant sources, and focusing on issues of connoisseurship and authenticity in art. At the same time, they also make use of materials from fields such as history, art history and archaeology to enrich their understanding of the contemporary society that produced these works.
Lin's own book project, for instance, explores just such a cross-disciplinary issue. "Landscape" as an aesthetic entity has dominated Chinese literature and art, and was often the primary vehicle through which the Chinese elites expressed themselves; it also informed their way of life, as they traveled the mountains, composed poetry and painted the sceneries, and constructed gardens or imperial parks near their residences. Lin is studying the origins of the Chinese fascination with landscape in the third century C.E., a rarely studied period when this phenomenon was just beginning to take shape. Focusing on the imperial capital of Ye, Lin is exploring the different types of interactions that the literati had with nature, including architectural and garden structures within the city, excursions to estates, rural villages and military campaigns outside the city, and exotic or ethereal landscapes of the mind evoked by tributary objects and their ideas of paradises.
As one outcome of exploring this project, Lin has uncovered the long-forgotten epistles of a once-famous third-century writer Ying Qu (190-252), and has found a surprising precedence in him for the famous pastoral poet Tao Qian (365-427). "Scholars have always considered Tao Qian to be this original poet who wrote poetry about his everyday life that sounded nothing like his contemporaries," Lin contends, "but in fact many of his lines, once considered accurate portrayals of his everyday life as a contented farmer, were actually taken from an earlier forgotten tradition of the recluse gentleman that culminated with the unlikely figure of Ying Qu." This research has resulted in two articles on Ying's epistles and on the process by which Tao came to epitomize the ideal figure of the reclusive gentleman, while Ying Qu, as a wealthy and powerful political figure, ironically gradually came to be forgotten.
The cross-disciplinary courses that Lin teaches also reflect her own interests. This semester, she taught a course cross-listed with Growth and Structures of Cities and the History of Art on "Early Chinese Cities and City Cultures." It began with the early Neolithic Banpo settlements and their red clay pottery and concluded with the 12th-century capital of Kaifeng, with its bustling commercial streets and elegant private gardens, culture of collecting and connoisseurship created by an excess of wealth, and refined taste in art dictated by a powerful monarch. Next year, she will teach a course on the "Literature of Everyday Life," beginning with the first-century-B.C.E. anthology, the Book of Odes, and concluding with the 18th-century masterpiece, Dream of the Red Chamber. She will also teach a course, cross-listed with the History Department, on the Culture of Modern China, exploring Chinese literature, art, and film as political commentaries to the 20th and 21st centuries.
Lin says she is enjoying the atmosphere of a small liberal-arts college. "We're so lucky here at Bryn Mawr," Lin says. "The students are fantastic, and it's great to be in such close contact with colleagues from other disciplines. The other day, a colleague from History of Art shared with me his approach to the city of London, and a colleague from the Cities Program gave me an excellent article about Chinese streets. At a larger institution, we might never have met."
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