Tree and stone culture gives a minimal impression of art

A Chinese-style garden complete with pavilions, a pond, ornamental rocks and bonsai, is now open on the roof of Shanghai Museum East.

The roof garden opened simultaneously with the exhibition The Resonance of Wood and Stone, featuring scholar's rocks and Shanghai-style penjing (miniature potted landscapes) on Sept 6, which also marked the launch of the new Jiangnan Gallery.

Located on the fourth floor, the gallery is dedicated to the exhibition of the craftsmanship, aesthetics and lifestyle in the lower range of the Yangtze River Delta, known in Chinese as Jiangnan, which has remained an important center for the Chinese civilization for thousands of years.

For several millennia, Chinese literati admired the natural landscapes as the embodiment of their spiritual ideals. The appreciation of ornament rocks was born from such spiritual pursuit. People picked rocks for their aesthetic values, often favoring those that look like the mountains and cliffs. They would have matching wood stands, shelves or pots made for each rock, and placed them on the desk, curio rack in their studios or in the garden.

As visitors step into the atrium of the gallery, they will find a series of scholar's rocks on exhibition on one side, and on the other side a set of classical Chinese furniture with stationery, arranged to look like an ancient Chinese scholar's study. A long table stands in the middle with a penjing installation on the top, consisting of rocks, orchids and moss, emulating the natural mountainous landscape.

"Collecting and appreciating rocks is a long tradition in China," Yang Zhigang, former director of Shanghai Museum, wrote in his preface to the exhibition Elegant Friends for a Lofty Studio: Scholar's Rocks Presented by Ms Hu Kemin, in 2020. "Scholar's rocks, or gongshi in Chinese, displayed as part of the accouterments in a learned man's study, have found favor with generations of the literati."

According to Shi Yuan, head of the handicraft department of Shanghai Museum, since Hu's donation of her collection of scholar's rocks in 2018 and the 2020 exhibition at Shanghai Museum, the museum has developed into an important platform for collection, research and showcasing of traditional Chinese ornamental rocks.