Cultural Connotations of flowers and Plants in Contemporary Chinese Gardens: Interpreting Aesthetic Embodiment Through Painting

Abstract

In contemporary Chinese garden spaces, flowers and plants play an important role in plant landscaping, they play an important role in the beautification of the environment on the one hand, and on the other hand, flowers and plants are also endowed with important cultural meanings, and the culture of gentleman and multiculturalism have become the main influences on the cultural connotations of flowers and plants in contemporary Chinese gardens. This research project adopts a hands-on studio approach to investigate how contemporary Chinese culture influences the types of flowers and plants in gardens through studio experiments and contextual approaches. Zhou Chunya, Bahar Behbahani, and Wu Guanzhong are the major artists within the study. They embodied their cultural allegories through the flowers and plants in their gardens. The project establishes the cultural connotations and the intrinsic relationship between flowers and plants in contemporary Chinese gardens, it also creates real garden spaces through paintings that evoke the impression of contemporary Chinese gardens, which are characterised by the combination of other constituent elements in the garden. By reassembling the composition, it creates a new visual space for the paintings and stimulates
the viewer’s aesthetic perception of the flowers and plants in Chinese gardens.