ABSTRACT
The subject of the painting, Wang Xizhi Watching Geese, lived almost a thousand years earlier. The mission of the artist at right is clear: to accurately represent the subject at left. This chapter outlines four ways the systematicity of the correlative view diagrammed mentioned in the chapter impacts architecture and experience in historic China: fluidities, fixities, porosities, and horizontalities. The distinctive trait of early Chinese cosmologies is the sheer variety of dynamic interchanges regarded as fundamental. The chapter discusses I Jing, or the Book of Changes. The dynamics between fluidity and fixity are best illustrated by the push–pull that characterizes Daoist versus Confucian sentiments, both primary colors to the Chinese cultural gestalt. The agrarian nature of ancient Chinese culture, and the vast expanses of land upon which that culture flourished, inculcated a sense of the horizontal dimension.
