We all have our images of Chinese landscape. Whether they come from films like the House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or from Chinese landscape painting with its washes of grey ink and misty mountain outlines, or even wildlife programmes with giant pandas roaming the bamboo glades, we all have a feel for these faraway landscapes.
Now, the Chinese landscape is coming to London in a cooperation between the British Museum and Kew Gardens. The forecourt of the British Museum will feature plants from western China, together with a recreation of a Chinese scholar’s garden.
The exhibition will explore the cultural meanings of the landscape in Chinese culture. The scholar’s garden attempts to recreate the best of the wild landscape within a tiny space, to create an area for meditation. Miniature touches refer back to the real landscape - a rock evokes a mountain, a tiny bridge evokes a mighty river. The garden becomes a place for contemplation - even in the middle of a busy city, enabling anyone who is in tune with the garden’s messages to commune with nature.
What I particularly like about this exhibition is that it will live on long after it officially closes (at the end of October). The Millennium Dome, for me, was a stupid waste, because it was only meant to last a year. Many of the plants on view at the British Museum, though, will be replanted in Brunswick Square at the end of the exhibition, bringing a touch of Oriental magic to the Camden streetscape.