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Dedicated to Bamboo

(Picture: all pictures by DS)

Bamboo

(7.6.2023) Our last microstory was on suburbia, and – did you notice? – suburbia, today, is full of bamboo. Which is interesting, since Europe is not actually the traditional home of bamboo. Actually Wikipedia does inform us explicitly that Europe (as well as the Antarctic) is not the home of bamboo, but bamboo is on the rise (and now also in Europe). And not only suburbia is full of bamboo, also the urban space sees bamboo on the rise. And there is a discourse on ›sustainability and bamboo‹. So, what is bamboo about? I don’t know exactly. Which is why I have embarked on doing a visual essay – on bamboo. And here it comes.

What a strange, what an interesting place for a bamboo: the above picture shows a bamboo in the old botanical garden of our university. It is placed outside the new palm house. It, the bamboo, is dreaming, musing, one might say, next to a glasshouse with all kinds of tropical plants, a house providing, artificially, a different climate than the one this bamboo has to live with. Outside the palm house. And the contemplation of bamboo, in a European city, also in the suburbs of this city, is something rather unusual, something rather ambiguous. We are looking at a type of grass, on the rise obviously, and also a notoriously fast grower, but we know little of the culture that is associated, in the various homes of bamboo, with bamboo. Is bamboo bringing this culture with it? Perhaps, it might. But only if we are able to articulate the cultural associations, which are not the ones we are familiar with. And we might associate bamboo with a discourse on sustainability, which is also ambiguous: a notoriously fast growing grass, certainly, a renewable resource on the rise, but the quality of some products made of bamboo has been called into question in recent years as well. So bamboo might belong into our iconography of sustainability, but the ambiguity of bamboo should not be forgotten.

It is easy, by the way, to find introductions to Chinese painting, in form of books, and written in European languages, but most introductions are not written by people who seem to be really able to think their way into traditions that are not their own. Therefore I am reading (and recommending to read): The Chinese Eye, by Chiang Yee, an exiled Chinese official who wrote many successful books under the pen name of the Silent Traveller. And also Chiang Yee is mentioning that one does not see bamboo in Europe, which might have been more or less correct when written (in 1936), but certainly is not correct anymore.

The small picture I did place on the left shows a bamboo (I believe), and I have chosen a sort of hanging scroll format for this picture. It does show a bird, bamboo, as well as a pond (in the background) with islands of reed grass. In the European traditions of painting, one might add here, it is the oak that sometimes does motivate a painter to think structurally, due to the particular structures of oak branches. The Chinese traditions of painting (I am always using the plural) seem to focus on symbolical (ethical), formal, poetic dimensions of bamboo (it is the upright, ›long-legged gentleman‹). One might use the bamboo (perhaps also the European, urban and suburban bamboo) as a curtain through which one might enter the sceneries of traditions that are rather unfamiliar to us. But one might also stay with what we are more familiar with: would Chiang Yee have associated bamboo with sustainability? This is a rather specific, technical, ecological discourse, but also an ethical one, also one with manyfolded (as we have seen) iconographies. And how is Chiang Yee looking at bamboo at all?

»Verisimilitude is never a first object; it is not the bamboo in the wind that we are representing but all the thought and emotion in the painter’s mind at a given instant when he looked upon a bamboo spray and suddenly harnessed his life to it for a moment. That moment may have had a psychological significance in itself, – the artist was leaving his native city, or parting from friends, – then the drooping attitude of the leaves will have a meaning for their creator beyond the comprehension of the onlooker had he written no explanation.« (p. 114f.)

Chiang Yee is discussing a picture (pp. 118-119) in which »[a]n appreciative Chinese critic […] would find in it the symbol of a literary man, suffering under the compulsion of other men; his own character is blameless, – he is the ›gentleman‹, but he cannot withstand the cruelties which the world has forced upon him.« (p. 119)

I have visited the plant nursery near the place I live again: it is a place where you might also buy bamboo (and I was surprised that one might also buy a rather spectacular oak tree, placed into a humongous pot). I have seen bamboo near the zoological garden, where it is probably cultivated as a fodder; I have seen bamboo groves (in the botanical garden; but also along some of the minor paths I know and tham I am using, when strolling around in suburbia). Birds live in, and with these groves, and people (perhaps not a European speciality) are carving their names into bamboo (as people are used to carve names into trees). I have seen European names, but also more exotic ones (Cheyenne), so perhaps bamboo is, today, part of what we might call a global culture. We’ll probably have to embark on some more walks to find that out.

Selected Literature:
Chiang Yee, The Chinese Eye. An Interpretation of Chinese Painting, London 1936

MICROSTORY OF ART
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