CHINESE ART AND ONE REASON WHY MODERN GEOLOGIC THOUGHT DID NOT ORIGINATE IN CHINA

Why did modern geologic thought originate in western Europe in the 17th Century and not in China which, at the same time, had an educated class interested in geologic phenomena such as magnetism, earthquakes, and hydrology?

The answer is multi-dimensional, but their art reveals that the Chinese interest in spatial relationships was fundamentally different from that of western Europeans. Western Europeans became obsessed with geometric perspective and used it to depict illusionistic, 3-dimensional landscapes. Their paintings were windows separating an objective observer from a scene with a past, a present, and a future. The western obsession with geometric perspective led to the Scientific Revolution in general and to Steno’s Principles in particular.

In contrast, the Chinese took little interest in mastering geometric perspective, let alone in applying geometry to understanding the structure and organization of nature. They produced two-dimensional landscapes, wherein elements ranging from rocks to mountains were flat, lacking volume, structure, or consistent depth of field relationships. The Chinese were less interested in representational portrayal of the objects of nature than in their idealized forms and “resonance” or commutability with adjacent objects. Any object could become another, and all depended upon each other for existence. As one’s eye wanders through many Chinese landscapes, the scenery changes in infinite, surprising ways; the myriad aspects of a single mountain are transient expressions of its creative character, and one mountain expresses all mountains. Chinese landscapes lacked the sense of spatial and temporal continuity that is fundamental to modern geologic thought.