New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 20, 2 (December 2018): 41-62

FROM HOME TO UTOPIA, AND BACK AGAIN:

LOCATING AND RELOCATING THE PEACH BLOSSOM SPRING

LUO HUI
Victoria University of Wellington

Abstract
Tao Qian’s “Peach Blossom Spring” (Tao hua yuan ji) is the archetypal Chinese
tale of utopian travel. The tale itself has been well-travelled through pictorial and
poetic representations since the fifth century. This essay focuses on three artists
whose reworking of the Peach Blossom Spring exemplifies the ways in which a
conventional literary motif can be revitalised and reinterpreted at various historical
junctures. Shitao’s (1642-1707) Peach Blossom Spring turns the utopian theme inward
to create a private elegy of loss, displacement and obliterated identity in the wake of
the Ming-Qing dynastic transition. Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) uses the motif of the
Peach Blossom Spring to project his experience of exile and homeward longing, set
against the vicissitudes of modern China. Xu Bing’s (b. 1955) installations tap into
public anxieties about the place of humanity amidst profound environmental and socio-
political change in the era of globalisation. By analysing the visual reinterpretations
of the Peach Blossom Spring by artists whose creative lives coincided with periods
of intense social and political change, I demonstrate that tradition and modernity are
mutually implicated in the context of Chinese visual culture, just as precedent and
innovation are equally important considerations in the history of Chinese art.

Introduction
Tao Qian’s 陶潛 (365-427 CE) “Peach Blossom Spring” (Taohua yuan ji 桃花源記) 1 is
the archetypal Chinese tale of utopian travel that has inspired numerous interpretations
in literary criticism, poetry, prose and pictorial illustrations. Traditional commentary on
the Peach Blossom Spring and poetic reworking of the theme tend to view the story as
either pseudo-historical or supernatural. As a result, the “Peach Blossom Spring” has
often been interpreted as a social utopia or a mythical paradise. These interpretations
have been so influential over the centuries that the Peach Blossom Spring has become
synonymous to utopia, paradise or a Chinese “Shangri-la”. However, as literary and
visual representations of the theme have become increasingly conventionalised and

1 In this essay, the title of Tao Qian’s original story, Taohua yuan ji, is translated into English
as the “Peach Blossom Spring,” with quotation marks. Without quotation marks, Peach
Blossom Spring is either used as a phrase that refers to the literary theme or describes a
painting on the theme. When there is no specific title, a Peach Blossom Spring painting is
generically referred to as a Taoyuan tu.
42 Luo Hui

clichéd, the interpretation of Tao Qian’s original story drifts farther away from the
immediate context of the poet’s life and work. In this article, I propose that, when read
in conjunction with Tao Qian’s poetry celebrating idyllic simplicity and his lifelong
quest for a private sanctuary, the “Peach Blossom Spring” reveals profound personal
meanings that have been overshadowed by its utopian or mythical interpretations.
Surveying the long tradition of visual reinterpretations of the Peach Blossom Spring
at various geographical and historical junctions, I further demonstrate that it is the
tension between the private and public dimensions of Tao Qian’s story that lends itself
to crossing historical divides and becoming an enduring artistic motif and a still-potent
metaphor for individual and collective experiences of dislocation, loss and nostalgia.
I will focus my analysis on three artists whose creative lives coincided with
periods of intense social and political change in Chinese history: Shitao 石濤 (1642-
1707) during the Ming-Qing dynastic transition, Zhang Daqian 張大千 (1899-1983)
throughout the Republican and the Communist eras, and finally, Xu Bing 徐冰 (b.
1955) at the forefront of 21st-century globalisation. The three artists’ reworking of the
Peach Blossom Spring exemplifies the ways in which a conventional literary motif
can be revitalised and enriched when personal and collective experiences conditioned
by historical circumstances are brought into the interpretative and creative process.
Shitao’s Taoyuan tu 桃源圖 turns the utopian theme inward to create a private elegy of
loss, displacement and obliterated identity, injecting new vitality into a staid pictorial
tradition. Centuries later, Zhang Daqian also used the motif of the Peach Blossom
Spring to project his experience of exile amidst the vicissitudes of modern China.
Though no less a maverick artist than Shitao, Zhang chose to express his nostalgia
and longing through his homage to the time-honoured Taoyuan tu tradition. Whilst not
explicitly referencing his personal history of forging an artistic career on foreign, non-
native ground, Xu Bing’s Tao Hua Yuan 桃花源 installations tap into public anxieties
about the place of humanity amidst profound environmental and sociopolitical change,
sentiments that are endemic in contemporary experiences of mass migration, diaspora,
and globalisation.

The original Peach Blossom Spring

The Tang poets were amongst the first to find traces of immortality in the Peach
Blossom Spring. Words such as xian 仙 (transcendent) and ling 靈 (numinous)
appeared in Wang Wei’s 王維 Taoyuan xing 桃源行, one of the earliest poetic
variations on Tao Qian’s prose. The high romantic spirit of the Tang certainly had
contributed to the Peach Blossom Spring’s designation as an immortals’ abode, and
popular Daoism’s fascination with eternal life perpetuated this imagination. Others,
such as the Song poet Su Shi 蘇軾, countered the claim of immortality with historical
references in the story— the mention of people who fled the cruelty of the Qin Emperor
and found refuge in the mountains. Su Shi, with his characteristic commonsense,
argued that the inhabitants were certainly not the same refugees who survived from
200 BC to 300 AD, achieving unlikely longevity, but rather the descendants of those
Qin subjects who went into hiding.
From home to utopia, and back again 43

The literati gradually abandoned the mortal/immortal debate, and compromised

on seeing the story as an envisagement of utopia in the form of a Golden Age ruled by
ancient sage kings or an agrarian society that was also egalitarian. Whilst this widely
accepted interpretation might sufficiently account for the world within the Peach
Blossom Spring, it does not concern itself with the problem of gaining access to that
world. In the story, the realistic description of life within the Peach Blossom Spring is
curiously placed in a frame structure. The fisherman was “unmindful” and “unaware
of the distance he had gone,” and, as if waking up from a dream, he could not find the
Peach Blossom Spring again after he had left it.
Zhang Longxi, in his review of Douwe Fokkema’s work on utopian fiction in
China and the West, notes that the tension between the collective and the individual
is less pronounced in the Chinese utopian vision than that of the Western, and
modern utopias in general tend to be more concerned with individual happiness
(Zhang 2012: 335-336). Whilst social harmony is a prominent feature of the world
within the Peach Blossom Spring, Tao Qian’s utopia is described, ultimately, as
a personal experience. It is a realm that was accessible to the fisherman when he
was alone, and the cave entrance was so narrow that it admitted only one person’s
body. When the prefecture conducted an organised search, it was unattainable.
Apparently Tao Qian’s utopia is not intended as a blueprint for social reform, but
as a personal sanctuary. The Daoists are right: it is only when without intention
could one attain awareness; those who search deliberately would not find the way.2
But if Tao Qian’s vision represented religious enlightenment, it would have been one
that was gained and then lost. Whereas most utopias are projected into the future (Frye
1965), the Peach Blossom Spring dwells upon the past. Tao Qian’s story describes a
way of life that belonged to the past, idealised and hidden. It is a lost world, accessed
through nostalgia. Like a childhood home, it is familiar yet strange, a place which can
only be momentarily revisited.
Indeed, longing for home is nothing short of an obsession in Tao Qian’s own life.
A scion of an old family of officials, Tao Qian was born into genteel poverty and had
seen his family in steady decline. Early in his career, he reluctantly held several minor
positions in order to support his aging mother and growing family. In 405, he finally
quit and went home, an event celebrated in his poem “The Return” (Guiqulai ci 歸去
來辭). Since then, Tao lived in constant poverty and sought solace in his simple, rustic
surroundings at the foot of Mount Lu (Lushan 廬山), in today’s Jiangxi province.
Tao Qian’s “Peach Blossom Spring” and “The Return” are two pieces of writing
that appear to be antithetical in sentiment and intent. Yet Susan Nelson has noted a
strong link between the two, seeing both as classic expressions of the ideal of the recluse
(Nelson 1986). Nelson’s intertextual reading also suggests that Tao Qian’s poetry may
contain the best clues to his enigmatic utopia. In “Imitations” (Nigu qi liu 擬古其六),

2 Daoist influences on Tao Qian’s poetry have been amply explored by scholars such as Kang-I
Sun Chang (1986), Zhang Longxi (1992) and Suyuan Lu (2017).
44 Luo Hui

he lamented that he was “tired of hearing the world’s comment”. In “Returning to the
Farm to Dwell” (Gui tianyuan ju qi yi 歸園田居 其一) he rejoiced, “For long I was a
prisoner in a cage/And now I have my freedom back again”. In a letter to his sons Yan,
etc., (Yu zi yan deng shu 與子儼等疏) he wrote, “Often in the fifth or sixth month/ I
would lie down beneath the northern window,/ And when the cool, fitful breeze arose,/
I would call myself a man of ancient time”. (Hightower 1970)
Biographical information also provides plausible explanations as to why Tao
Qian’s utopia looks backward instead of forward. The decline of his family through
the generations may have caused him to look on their past glories in a nostalgic light.
The fall of Eastern Jin to the rule of Liu Yu 劉裕 (363–422), who later founded the
Liu Sung Dynasty in 420, also prompted Tao Qian to see a parallel between his own
circumstances and those who fled the oppressions of the Qin.
But Tao Qian did not flee into the mountains. He returned home, where hunger,
poverty and strife were made bearable with peace, tranquility and idyllic simplicity.
The Peach Blossom Spring is a poetic commingling of all these realities, yearlings and
imaginings. Yet by framing that utopian vision in a dream-like past, the poet reveals
what his utopia really is: nowhere, or a home to which one cannot find one’s way back.

After paradise: Shitao’s Taoyuan tu

Paintings of the Peach Blossom Spring began to be recorded in literary sources since
the early Tang.3 The artists’ names were seldom mentioned, as painting still remained
largely a skilled craft, and the concept of the painter as an individual artist was yet to
emerge. According to the descriptions, Tang paintings of the Peach Blossom Spring
appear to be mostly decorative illustrations of paradise scenes.
Court painters in the Song Dynasty are also said to have had used the theme in
their works. Zhao Boju 趙伯駒 (fl. 12th century) once painted a version of the Taoyuan
tu that became a frequent reference for later painters. The painting did not survive. But
Zhao’s Autumn Colors over Streams and Mountains (江山秋色圖) (Fig. 1), a painting
of stylised figures and buildings against a magnificent backdrop of twisting mountain
forms in blue and green, may suggest the way he might have treated a paradise scene or
a narrative landscape of the Peach Blossom Spring.
During the Yuan Dynasty, the theme was rediscovered by literati painters, and it
soon became a staple in their repertoire. As with all things literati, a strong personal
touch characterised their approach. Painters at this time were less concerned with
depicting a site or visualising a story. The narrative aspect was downplayed, and the
landscape often had a lyrical quality that evoked a state of mind.

3 This brief summary of the pictorial representations of the Peach Blossom Spring up to the
Ming is based on Dorothy Chen-Courtin’s dissertation, “The Literary Theme of the ‘Peach
Blossom Spring’ in Pre-Ming and Ming Painting” (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms
International, 1982).
From home to utopia, and back again 45

Figure 1: Zhao Boju, Autumn Colors over Streams and Mountains 江山秋色圖 (section).
Handscroll, ink and pigment on silk, c. 1160. 56.6 x 323.2 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

Most of the numerous Peach Blossom Spring paintings we see today are from
the Ming. Considering the Ming preoccupation with emulating the ancients, it is
believed that the period’s principal contribution to painting was in the interpretation
and synthesis of previous styles and currents. Peach Blossom Spring paintings from
this era too exhibit the desire to be comprehensive, as generic paradise scenes exist
side by side with highly subjective “landscapes of the mind”. Ming painters either
illustrated the legend in its entirety or sought to capture the mood of the theme with
a minimum number of signal images such as the stream, flowering peach trees, the
cave or the fisherman. Peach Blossom Spring paintings eventually became a cultural
phenomenon in its own right. A genre was formed, and repetition gradually hardened
into conventions. (Chen-Courtin 1982)
More than a thousand years after Tao Qian wrote the “Peach Blossom Spring”,
Shitao (1642-1707) painted a small cave image which, without the artist’s own
inscription, would not have been identified as a Taoyuan tu (Fig 2). The painting
is included in a landscape album of Mount Huang (Huangshan 黃山), dedicated to
Shitao’s friend Huang Yanlü 黃硯旅 (1661-1725). The artist’s inscription suggests the
almost compulsory practice of painting the Peach Blossom Spring in his time, and
lightly mocks it:

The Taoyuan tu these days are getting meticulously detailed. I did this one
with a few quick brushstrokes and am not sure if I succeeded. Those who
know must have something to say about this.4

It is a small-scale monochrome painting. All the familiar iconography of Taoyuan

tu is discarded except the entrance to the cave. The cave, instead of being rocky and
rugged, is fleshed out with soft brush strokes to produce an image that resembles the
entrance to the womb. On the right-side edge of the cave entrance, in the foreground,

4 My translation is based on text and image from Li Yeshuang’s book, Shitao’s World (Taipei:
Xiongshi Tushu Company, 1973).
46 Luo Hui

Figure 2: Shitao, Taoyuan tu, circa 1690s. Reproduction based on Li Yeshuang 李葉霜. 1973.
Shitao de shijie 石濤的世界 (Shitao’s world). Taipei: Xiongshi tushu chuban gongsi: 115.

is the small figure of the fisherman. We are not certain if he has just entered the cave
or he has just left it. The ambiguity here shuts out the two worlds on either side of the
cave and focuses exclusively on the entrance itself. The painting brings us back to the
opening paragraph of Tao Qian’s “Peach Blossom Spring”:

During the Tai-yuan period (376-396) of the Chin Dynasty a fisherman of

Wu-ling once rowed upstream, unmindful of the distance he had gone, when
he suddenly came to a grove of peach trees in bloom. For several hundred
paces on both banks of the stream there was no other kind of tree. The wild
flowers growing under them were fresh and lovely, and fallen petals covered
the ground – it made a great impression on the fisherman. He went on for
a way with the idea of finding out how far the grove extended. It came to
an end at the foot of a mountain whence issued the spring that supplied
the stream. There was a small opening in the mountain and it seemed as
though light was coming through it. The fisherman left his boat and entered
the cave, which at first was extremely narrow, barely admitting his body;
after a few dozen steps it suddenly opened out onto a broad and level plain
where well-built houses were surrounded by rich fields and pretty ponds.
(Hightower 1970: 255)

Read with Shitao’s image in mind, the fisherman’s entry into the Peach Blossom
Spring suddenly seems like a reenactment of the passage of birth. It now seems
uncertain whether he is entering a utopian world or simply reliving the memory of the
motherly womb. From a psychoanalytical point of view, the Peach Blossom Spring
contains one of the most potent archetypal images — that of the archetype of birth. The
From home to utopia, and back again 47

power of the archetype, according to true Jungians, lies in the collective unconscious,
transcending temporal and geographical boundaries. It is no mere accident that Shitao’s
Taoyuan tu, whilst discarding all other narrative details, retains only the most essential
one: the cave entrance.
In this painting, Shitao gives the non-mimetic tradition of literati painting a radical
spin, and miraculously, brings us back to Tao Qian’s original story. This is achieved
not by faithfully illustrating the story but by focusing in and intensifying it. That the
fisherman’s entry into the cave can signify childbirth from a mother’s womb might not
have been what Tao Qian had in mind. But Shitao’s image opens up new possibilities for
reinterpretation. Shitao, a descendant of the Ming royal family who lived a vagrant life
under Manchu rule, certainly had shared Tao Qian’s feelings of nostalgia. An orphan,
a monk, and then a returnee to the secular world who made a living as a professional
painter, Shitao’s longing for home was often not just a sentiment, but a genuine physical
and emotional need. If Tao Qian’s utopian vision had derived from a private urge to
return home, a home that was also utopian, what could be a more apt metaphor for that
home than a mother’s womb?
Although Qing painting in general is said to be repetitive and lacking originality,
the decades that immediately followed the fall of the Ming produced some of the most
innovative painters in Chinese history. It was during this period that painters brought
new perspectives to the Peach Blossom Spring, a theme that had become increasingly
conventionalised. At the time of the Qing conquest in 1644, the Ming loyalist Chen
Hongshou 陳洪綬 (1598-1652) painted a Taoyuan tu, as he wrote in his inscription,
to express his feelings about the circumstances of the times. In a Taoyuan tu painted
by Zha Shibiao 查士標 (1615-1698) in 1696, the scene has none of the traditional
paradise flavour (Fig. 3). Many of these paintings have not survived, but the colophons
and commentary suggest that they envisioned the Peach Blossom Spring in a personal,
disillusioned light, reflecting a shift away from imageries of fantasy (Nelson 1986: 41).

Figure 3: Zha Shibiao (Cha Shih-piao) (1615-1698), The Peach Blossom Spring 桃源圖
(section). Handscroll, ink and pigment on paper, 1696. 35.23 x 312.75 cm. The Nelson-Atkins
Museum of Art, Kansas City.
48 Luo Hui

The Peach Blossom Spring theme gained new significance for early Qing painters,
especially those who considered themselves yimin 遺民 or “leftover subjects.” Never
openly declared himself a loyalist, Shitao must have felt the change of the times as
did other “leftover subjects”. His relation to the Ming royal family would only have
made his case more sensitive. Shitao had created at least two versions of Taoyuan tu.
The album leaf, as we have seen earlier, eschews conventional trappings of the theme
and focuses exclusively on the cave entrance. His handscroll version (Fig 4), although
following a less iconoclastic route, expresses a sense of involvement that is both subtle
and intimate.
Painted with his characteristically assertive brushstrokes, Shitao’s Peach Blossom
Spring retells the whole legend through an economic use of setting and narrative detail.
The painting begins with a brief visual void on the right, then a conical hill with some
rooftops. There is a suggestion of rice fields, and in the distance a man ploughs the
field with a buffalo. The viewer suddenly realises that he is already inside the Peach
Blossom Spring. A dramatic mountain range loops in from the top-left to encircle the
enchanted village. Three villagers go up the path to greet the fisherman from the right.
Around them are simple thatched cottages, a wooden bridge over a stream, rice-fields
and a scattering of trees. On the other side of the mountain, a stream snakes its way
between the precipitous rocks and flowering peach trees. The boat is moored, hiding
behind the mountain range. More mountains and clouds. As the scene fades away, a
city wall serves as a reminder that this is where the mundane world begins.
The lost realm seems definitively separated from our world by the stream
flowing between the deep gorges. Furthermore, rocky precipices appear to be literally
fending off intruders. Finally, the simplicity of the village huts, in juxtaposition with
the ornate, double-tiered tile roof and the massive city wall, further differentiate the
Peach Blossom Spring from the external world. However, by reversing the story-
telling sequence, first the lost valley and the encounter, then the boat in the stream and
finally the outside world, Shitao’s Peach Blossom Spring offers the viewer a different
vantage point. Such a presentation not only elicits surprise, but also suggests that the
idyllic life within the valley, in sharp contrast to the embattled outside world, may not
be something accessible only to an immortal or in a dream. Already within the site
of Peach Blossom Spring at the opening of the scroll, the viewer is invited to come
into spontaneous and immediate identification with the fisherman and the villagers.
Physical and emotional closeness to the lost village also constitutes a rejection of the
mundane world, of the here and now.
Portraying a world at once fantastic and ordinary, remote yet within reach, the
painter makes his political implications almost palpable. The Peach Blossom Spring,
once believed to be a refuge for the descendants of the Qin subjects who fled the
cruelties of the First Emperor, could easily lend itself to expressing Ming loyalist
sentiments, which were not foreign to Shitao and his social circles. Yet, as we delve
further into this painting and related works, a simple, straightforward allegorical
reading based on Ming loyalism would not do full justice to the rich complexities of
Shitao’s work and its historical context.
Figure 4: The Peach Blossom Spring, Shitao (c. 1641-1717). Handscroll. Ink and light color
From home to utopia, and back again

on paper. 25 x 158 cm. Artist’s colophon, signature, three seals, dated 15th day of the 7th lunar
month, no year. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Figure 5: The Ancestral Tombs of the Fei Family 費氏先塋圖, Shitao, 1702, ink and pigment on
paper, 29 x 110 cm. Musée national des Arts asiatiques-Guimet, Paris.
49
50 Luo Hui

Dated but with no specified year of composition, Shitao’s Peach Blossom Spring
was painted no earlier than 1690, and some art historians put the date in the last decade
of the artist’s life.5 The artist’s inscription reads:
The Spirit Mountains are full of deep recesses;
In such a gorge, a village lies enclosed.
A fisherman comes to it, quite by hazard –
Peach blossom petals scent the flowing stream.
Once left, it’s lost; who could he ask the way of?
And the road back is gone from his memory.
It’s not like the summit of Mount T’ien-t’ai,
Where one can return by crossing the Stone Bridge.
The Peach Blossom Spring picture: on the zhong-yuan day, I was seized by
exhilaration and drew this, using a poem by my fellow student Fei Ziheng.
Qingxiang yiren, Dadi zi, Ji. (Chen-Courtin 1982: 233)

The emphasis of Fei’s poem is not so much on the peaceful life within the Peach
Blossom Spring as it is on the impossibility of finding the way back to it. “Once left, it’s
lost” and it belongs only to memory. The last two lines imply that even an immortalised
place such as Mount T’ien-t’ai is more traceable than the lost village. What does the
village really stand for, for Fei Ziheng, who apparently commissioned the painting, and
for Shitao, who painted it?
Fei Ziheng 費滋衡 (1664-?), more commonly known as Fei Xihuang 費錫
璜, belonged to a prominent Ming loyalist family and was one of Yangzhou’s most
prominent intellectual figures. His grandfather, Fei Jingyu 費經虞 (1599-1671), had
become an official in the final years of the Ming dynasty. Fei Xihuang’s father, Fei
Mi 費密, was deeply involved in the resistance against the Manchus in their home
province of Sichuan. After their hometown Xinfan fell in 1653, Fei Mi moved his
family to Mianxian, where they took refuge along with other Xinfan families in a small
village, White Deer Village. Some families later settled there, but Fei Mi left Mianxian,
taking his family to join his father in Yangzhou in 1658. For fifteen years, from
1644 to 1658, the family knew a history of withdrawal, resistance, refuge and exile.6
The Fei family finally settled in Yangzhou and rose to prominence, but their hometown
in Sichuan remained a haunting memory for generations. Fei Xihuang wrote in an ode
about the ancestral home he had at that point never seen:

A hundred mu of farmland, a village of peach blossom: A hundred different

types of bird congregate there, and monkeys screech after each other in play.
This was true pleasure. But bandits came from Shenxi and Gansu and turned

5 Both James Cahill and Jonathan Hay date the painting after 1702, the year Shitao finished
The Ancestral Tombs of the Fei Family (Fig. 5).
6 Biographical information on the Fei family is based on Jonathan Hay, Shitao: Painting and
Modernity in Early Qing China (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 61.
From home to utopia, and back again 51

the city and the surrounding area into a cemetery. Over a thousand-mile
area they destroyed the homefires. For three years there was no cultivation;
people watched for each other’s death and ate [the dead]. My home village
was in ruins and uninhabitable, so my parents left the village and its families
behind and came east to Jiangdu [Yangzhou]. As I look back toward Ba and
Shu it seems as remote as the Big Dipper. I have been thinking of going
back west, but the road to Shu is extremely dangerous; I wanted to go by
water, but the Qutang gorge is impassible; I was going to take the mountain
roads, but the Sword Pavilions and Bronze Bridge are difficult to climb. I
look westward to the graveside trees and my heart suffers in sorrow. (Hay
2001: 62-63)

The preoccupation with the ancestral home in faraway Sichuan was the family’s
most tangible link to their past, a preoccupation which resulted in Shitao’s 1702
panoramic handscroll, The Ancestral Tombs of the Fei Family 費氏先塋圖 (Fig 5). The
progression from right to left, from the town to the countryside and then finally to the
tomb site, produces the solemn effect of a pilgrimage to the past. There is an uncanny
similarity between this handscroll and Shitao’s other painting, The Peach Blossom
Spring. An almost identical city gate divides the town of Xinfan and the world of the
dead, just as it divided the village within the Peach Blossom Spring and the mundane
outside world. Although the painting opens with the human world of Xinfan, the misty
atmosphere makes it seem distant and unreal. It is the exuberant countryside that
demands the spectator’s most attention. For a brief moment, we are with the ancestors
as Shitao’s painting transports us to the world of the dead.
Both Shitao and the Fei family knew that the painting was not just a token
of orthodox filial piety. Beyond being a legitimate moral statement, there was an
emotional quality to the painting that grew out of the intermingling of two personal
histories. Shitao’s painting did not just passively respond to the Fei family history.
It was steeped in the painter’s own experience. In Shitao’s poem inscription in the
painting, he revealed his complete identification with the Feis with this line: “He fled
his devastated home like an orphan in winter”. Here, Shitao was clearly alluding to his
own fate as an orphan prince.
The interaction between life and art did not stop here. The emotional power
Shitao’s handscroll conveyed was so strong that it prompted Fei Xihuang to go on the
pilgrimage that his father and grandfather had never made. He did indeed journey to
Sichuan some years after his father’s death to pay his respects at the ancestral tombs.
Here are the last few lines from a poem written during his pilgrimage:
Half covered in grass, it shines with morning dew,
Entangled with shrubbery and creepers.
Nearby families are astonished at my return,
Women and children peer at the man from the distant east.
Ten thousand li to pour a single cup of wine,
And sprinkle water on the roots of a withered tree. (Hay 2001: 63)
52 Luo Hui

Fei Xihuang’s poem brings us back to the encounter scene in Shitao’s other
handscroll, The Peach Blossom Spring, which was mostly likely painted after The
Ancestral Tombs of the Fei Family but before Fei Xihuang’s Sichuan journey. It is now
evident that Shitao had the Fei family in mind when he painted his Peach Blossom
Spring, and the village he depicted in the painting might well have been his vision of
the Fei’s ancestral home.
We begin to see an engrossing intertextual relationship between Shitao’s painting
and Fei Xihuang’s writing, which ran parallel to the intermingling of their respective
family histories. In a prose piece written during his Sichuan journey, Fei Xihuang
recounted his visit to White Deer Village, where his family had taken refuge:

In the past Zhongchang Tong (179-219) wrote an Essay on Happiness and

Tao Yuanming (365-427) a Record of the Peach Blossom Spring, but both
described fictional paradises that did not really exist. White Deer Cliff is the
kind of place that those two gentlemen dreamed of without ever actually
seeing. When my family was caught up in the chaos, it took refuge here.
The other refugee families, the Zhaos, the Yangs, the Yins, are all distantly
related to my own. When I arrived they were all overjoyed: “A descendant
of the Fei family has come!” they cried. I listened to the elders as they
talked of how they had fled together and assembled here seventy years ago.
Now that one of the Feis can be seen again, the women peep out from
behind curtains and children line up at the sides. In the evening I was served
beans to go with the wine; a fire was lit to throw some light, and we talked
warmly all through the night. The joy of returning to one’s home was never
greater than that night. I heard, too, that when the ten thousand peach trees
blossom, their petals fall into the flowing water and sometimes reach the
outside world. How could the Peach Blossom Spring be any better than
this? (Hay 2001: 64)

Literature’s capacity to weave beautiful memories out of wretched material is

inexhaustible. The Sichuan utopia of the Fei family imagination here merges with Tao
Qian’s utopian vision. Together, they provide the context for Shitao’s painting of the
Peach Blossom Spring, which captures that precious yet fleeting moment of return to
one’s ancestral home. Shitao’s Peach Blossom Spring recasts the vision of utopia on a
personal and deeply emotional plane, and demonstrates once again that the power of
this familiar motif lies in its capacity for linking the private and the public, the personal
and the political, the self and the state – the dynamics of which not only drove Tao
Qian’s original narrative but also animated much of the later literati literature and art.
An orphan prince who lived under foreign rule, a Buddhist monk who turned
secular and then Daoist, an iconoclastic artist who wavered between literati and popular
cultures, Shitao used many different names and guises to match his chameleon-like
painting style. According to Jonathan Hay, a correlation exists between Shitao’s self-
identity and his creative live, and his “nomadic” existence served to intensify the sense
of self-representation in his painting:
From home to utopia, and back again 53

Shitao was never securely in any one place: He was always on the verge of
slipping into another name, another method, another social role. Though
he came close to naming himself openly as Zhu Ruoji at the end of his life,
he never quite did, and there were those who doubted his claim to princely
status. As obsessive as he was in his self-reference – no other painter had
ever said “I” to quite this degree, with quite this consistency or outsider’s
need – the self-reference nonetheless was always mobile. (Hay 2001: 2)

Hay’s emphasis on self-reference, or expressing the “I” through painting, is a central

idea in his study of Shitao in relation to painting and modernity in early Qing China.
If saying the “I” through painting is a hallmark of visual modernity, one could
perhaps argue that germinations of this “modern” sensibility were also present in the
literati paintings of the Song and the Yuan. However, Shitao was arguably the first
major painter whose self expression through painting was no longer confined to quiet
philosophical contemplation; it had the urgency of an identity crisis brought on by
difficult personal and historical circumstances. Without a secure identity based on
family and social relations, Shitao had to create an identity through art. This creative
urge lent a strong autobiographical colouring to much of his work. Seldom does the
work of a classical Chinese painter carry a stronger and more complex autobiographical
imprint than Shitao’s. His dual role as a literati artist and a professional painter forced
him to reconcile his own ideal of self-representation with customer demands and
popular tastes. In paintings such as The Ancestral Tombs of the Fei Family and The
Peach Blossom Spring, Shitao maximised painting’s capacity to visualise memories
and experiences, those of others and his own.

A return to tradition: Zhang Daqian’s Peach Blossom Spring

Attesting to the longevity and continued relevance of Taoyuan tu is its manifestation
in twentieth-century Chinese painting, including one by Zhang Daqian 張大千 (1899-
1983), the painter who exemplified the link between the classical and the modern in
Chinese painting. Beneath the aura of a world-famous artist, Zhang’s private life had
been one of perpetual exile and displacement. Born in Sichuan in 1899, Zhang left
China for Hong Kong after the Communist takeover. He subsequently moved to South
America in 1953 and settled in Brazil. After 16 years living in Brazil, he moved to
Carmel, California, and lived there for seven years. He finally “returned home” to
Taiwan, where he was welcomed as a celebrity. Until his death in 1983, he had never
returned to China.
A noteworthy detail about Zhang Daqian’s expatriate life in Brazil is that, in
1954, he bought a farm and named it Ba-de Garden 八德園. Treating it as a canvas, he
created a Chinese-style home with gardens, ponds and hills. It is believed that he often
modelled his paintings on the scenery at his Brazilian retreat. This was his own Peach
Blossom Spring, although a dislocated one that was abandoned after 16 years.
Zhang Daqian’s Peach Blossom Spring (Fig 6) was painted during the final year
of his life, 1983, when he was living in Taiwan. The work belies his reputation as a
54 Luo Hui

Figure 6 (left): Zhang Daqian (1899-1983),

Peach Blossom Spring, 1983. Hanging scroll,
ink and pigment on paper. 209.1 x 92.4 cm.
Private collection.

Figure 7 (below): Wang Hui (1632-1717), The

Peach Blossom Fishing Boat. Album leaf, ink
and pigment on paper, 28.5 x 43 cm. Palace
Museum, Taipei.
From home to utopia, and back again 55

maverick artist. There is bold, semi-abstract use of splashed ink and blue-and-green
pigment in the middle and background, but dominating the foreground are the familiar
icons of Taoyuan tu: cliffs, stream, fishing boat and blossoming peach trees. The overall
atmosphere evoked is that of a mythical paradise. Zhang’s Peach Blossom Spring brings
to mind a painting on the same theme by Wang Hui 王翬 (1632-1717), entitled The
Peach Blossom Fishing Boat (Fig 7), which is composed with the requisite vocabulary
of Taoyuan tu. The atmosphere is decidedly mythical and paradisiacal. What is
conspicuously lacking, in both paintings, is any real concern with the world within the
Peach Blossom Spring – the inaccessibility heightens its mystique, and the journeying
towards is itself the reward. This philosophical approach no doubt belongs to the larger
Taoyuan tu tradition that Wang Hui inherited from his predecessors. Indeed, Wang Hui
openly acknowledged in his inscription that his scroll was a copy of another painting of
the same title by the Yuan Dynasty artist Zhao Mengfu.
We cannot ascertain whether or not Zhang Daqian modelled his Peach Blossom
Spring after Wang Hui’s or one by another early master. However, it is evident that he
internalised and synthesised the visual vocabulary of the Taoyuan tu tradition, which he
employed in his painting. This Peach Blossom Spring may not have been Zhang’s most
innovative work, nor does it particularly stand out from the long roster of paintings on
this theme. Perhaps what is of interest here is precisely why an innovative artist chose
to resort to convention late in his career. Describing Zhang Daqian as both a “luminous
modernist” and a “re-robed traditionalist”, Li-ling Hsiao and David A. Ross argue that
the most unassuming of Zhang’s images can be “rife with veiled propositions about
metaphysics, religion, and politics” and may contain “both an autobiographical gist and
a philosophical summation”. (Xiao & Ross 2011: 87) There are strong reasons for us
not to dismiss Zhang’s Peach Blossom Spring too quickly as yet another worn example
of the long Taoyuan tu tradition.
When Zhang Daqian painted his Peach Blossom Spring, he was also working on
a giant mural painting, entitled Panorama of Mount Lu, which he had never finished.
As an artist who had roamed the world most of his life before finally returning to
Chinese-speaking Taiwan, Zhang Daqian invested his last creative energy in painting
two traditional Chinese scenes that were thematically intertwined: one was the mythical
paradise derived from Tao Qian’s muted and yet eloquent call for peace and tranquility,
the other a scenic site immortalised by numerous Chinese paintings and poems over
the centuries, near the very location where Tao Qian physically resided in retirement.
Although already in Taiwan, Zhang Daqian was not quite home. Separated from
this island by a narrow strait, a different political system and a different modern history,
the Chinese mainland was where Zhang Daqian’s spiritual and artistic origins lay. Both
his final projects pointed to that same direction. Both resorted to memory, expressing
the same longing. Mount Lu, with its concrete existence and its inaccessibility, was no
less potent a token of nostalgia than the ethereal Peach Blossom Spring.
To explain why Zhang Daqian chose to paint the Peach Blossom Spring towards
the end of his life, and why he modelled his version after the earlier masters, we must
first consider why the Peach Blossom Spring has entered the repertoire of nearly every
56 Luo Hui

major painter since the Ming Dynasty. Perhaps the theme, with its noble idealism, its
preference for idyllic simplicity, and its nostalgic sensibility, has so captured the Chinese
imagination that it achieved a mythical status, and it has come to symbolise a certain
“Chinese-ness” that might rise above or overcome political division. On one hand,
Zhang Daqian’s Peach Blossom Spring was an act of homage to a long and venerable
Chinese pictorial tradition, out of a desire to inhabit it rather than demolish it. On the
other hand, the painting was a powerful expression of his unrequited desire for a lost
home, both physically and spiritually. Therefore, Zhang’s Taoyuan tu is at once a reprisal
of a classical painting tradition and a poignant commentary on modern Chinese history.

Chinese utopia gone global: Xu Bing’s installations

Xu Bing’s installation, Travelling to the Wonderland (Victoria & Albert Museum,
London, Nov. 2013 – Mar. 2014), (hereafter V&A) exemplifies the latest visual
manifestation of Tao Qian’s utopian vision by a contemporary artist (Fig 8). Occupying
the site of the V&A’s John Madejski Garden, the multi-media installation is a stylised
Chinese landscape intended as physical embodiment of the Peach Blossom Spring. A
circular rock formation surrounding a body of water, decorated with artificial peach
blossom branches and miniature ceramic houses, cows, monkies, zebras, flamingos,
origami cranes and copulating human couples, Xu Bing’s Peach Blossom Spring
resembles a large-sacle bonsai, or a condensed Suzhou garden. Enhancing the classical
elements with LCD screens, sound, mist and lighting effects, the artist aims to “bring
Chinese ink painting to life in a three-dimensional sensory experience” (Singh 2014).
In the artist’s statement and in various interviews, Xu Bing claims that a philosophy
of “working in harmony with nature” underpins much of Chinese art, especially
landscape painting. He sees his Travelling to the Wonderland as a much-needed
revisiting of that philosophy amidst the social and environmental crises that the world
faces today. (Xu 2013) Yet one cannot help but noting the ironic contrast between Xu
Bing’s evocation of Peach Blossom Spring-like idyllic simplicity and the technological
sophistication, elaborate scale, and indeed material excess of this work. Media reports
make a selling point of the fact that the stones used in the installation are collected from
five different regions in China, and that the miniature ceramic houses are all handmade
in Jingdezhen and designed to reflect different styles of housing in different Chinese
provinces (Whittaker 2013). The work’s material excess is further compounded by a
surfeit of labour that went into its making. In video footage showcasing the creative
process of the work, we see large teams of assistants lifting, cutting, polishing and
installing the rocks with assorted machinery, under the artist’s close supervision.
Xu Bing does not deny or disguise the labour-and-capital intensive nature of this
work, accepting such material conditions that define his practice as a highly successful
contemporary artist in the world today. His art is famous for challenging the viewers’
first impression by showing them something that turns out to be not what it seems. This
play on construction and representation permeates his dialogue with traditional Chinese
culture, most notably in his Book from the Sky and Background Story installations
(Harrist 2011). Travelling to the Wonderland is characteristically playful with
construction and representation. The installation is painstakingly mimetic in its material
From home to utopia, and back again 57

Figure 8: Xu Bing. Travelling to the Wonderland, 2013. Mixed media installation: stone, clay,
mist, light and sound effect, LCD screen. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

execution, but the idea behind this material construction – the story of Peach Blossom
Spring itself – is elusive and ephemeral. As if to deflate any possibility of identification
with a thing of the past, Xu Bing allows glimpses of hidden machines and cables from
certain angles. This slippage, as Xiaolin Li has observed, reminds the audience that this
Peach Blossom Spring, this “wonderland”, was ultimately un-real and unattainable, in
spite of the technological and material means available to us today (2013).
The English title, Travelling to the Wonderland, seems to give in to the breezy
consumerism of world travel with a Disneyesque destination. Yet it would be
oversimplification to label Xu Bing’s work as a postmodern simulacrum of a Chinese
pictorial tradition. The occasion for the creation of this work suggests more serious
intentions and deeper layers of relationship with Chinese tradition. The work was
commissioned to coincide with the V&A’s exhibition “Masterpieces of Chinese Painting
700 – 1900”, which also opened in November 2013. In addition, the installation in the
John Madejski Garden was accompanied by a display of works on paper by Xu Bing in
the T.T. Tsui Gallery. These included one of his large-scale New English Calligraphy
pieces, based on Taohuayuan ji, Tao Qian’s original tale of the Peach Blossom Spring.
Also on display were paintings representing Xu Bing’s vision of Taohuayuan and
sketches detailing the process of creating the garden installation. These meticulous
layers of context and frames of reference surrounding the installation, as well as the
slippage in the execution of the installation, point to the artificial nature of the work,
but at the same time accentuate the intentionality behind its construction. By visually
and materially playing on the real and the unreal, Xu Bing brings out the paradox that
has been at the core of Tao Qian’s utopian vision and gives it a modern spin: homeward
longing has always been coloured with utopian sentiments and in our world now as in
Tao Qian’s world then, natural simplicity itself can be a costly construction.
58 Luo Hui

Figure 9: Xu Bing, Tao Hua Yuan: A Lost Village Utopia, 2014. Chatsworth, UK.

Travelling to the Wonderland has gone through two more iterations since its debut
at the V&A. Retitled as Tao Hua Yuan: A Lost Village Utopia, it was a centrepiece of
the Sotheby’s Beyond Limits sculpture exhibition at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, in 2014
(Fig 9). Set against the formal hedges and the majestic country house of Chatsworth,
the installation/public sculptural work occupied a body of water, the normal location of
the famous Sea Horse Fountain, which had been temporarily removed for restoration.
The Chatsworth installation had a more subdued, minimalist feel than its debut version
at the V&A. Artistic merit notwithstanding, the work, being a part of Sotheby’s selling
exhibition, attracted more attention for its commercial value. The installation itself,
though by definition site-specific, was available for purchase. And, as The Telegraph
bluntly put it, “the choice of a Chinese artist for such a prominent position in the
exhibition is likely to prove popular with paying visitors”, and “visitors from China
spend on average four times more than tourists from other countries” (Singh 2014).
Thus the mixed context of this installation, like the work itself, also walks a ambiguous
line between fine art and commercial (re)production.
In his attempt at a postmodern interpretation of Tao Qian’s “Peach Blossom
Spring”, Wang Ning states, quite without cynicism, that the contemporary relevance
of “The Peach Blossom Spring” lies in the fact that the tale can be “easily read in an
allegorical way as a Third World text, starting from which Western people could reflect
From home to utopia, and back again 59

on its own culture” (1997: 218). At first glance, the two UK versions of Xu Bing’s
Peach Blossom Spring installation seem like a perfect illustration of this view, one that
peddles the ancient wisdom of the Orient as a salve to modern ailments of the West, in
a visually appealing and easily digestible manner. Considering the choice of sites for
his two UK installations, both with strong associations of empire and power, one might
argue that Xu Bing was engaged in a form of self-orientalisation, although one of the
knowing, winking kind. But that is not the end of the story.
With a twist laden with irony, Xu Bing’s Peach Blossom Spring finally saw its
“return” to Chinese soil with its third installation in 2016. The site was the Beijing
Olympic Water Park. This massive manmade backdrop is a far cry from Tao Qian’s rustic
simplicity, albeit promising a different Chinese utopian vision for the new millennium.
The installation was co-sponsored by a mixed brigade of artistic and commercial entities,
including Beautiful Asset, Xu Bing Studio, Unrestrained Art Makers, Beijing Olympic
Water Park, and Beijing Jing Ende Kai Investment Management Company Limited.
Unlike the two UK versions that created beautiful, exotic illusions against iconic
landmarks of the former British empire inviting Orientalist or Post-Colonial readings,
the Chinese version looks decidedly more down-to-earth and “realist” in its execution
(Fig 10). The rock formation does not circle a pool of pristine water, as at the V&A and
Chatsworth, but a pocket of dry ground, with the lawn broken up and tilled in a way that
suggests subsistence farming or communal gardening. A knowing departure also takes
place in the Chinese title of the piece, with a direct reference to the “Peach Blossom
Spring” and an impassioned, quasi-revolutionary call to realise that dream (Taohua
yuan de lixiang yiding yao shixian 桃花源 de理想一定要实现). As “Taohua yuan”, in
Chinese, is synonymous with a dream that cannot be realised, this juxtaposition gives
an empty ring to the revolutionary plea. The insertion of the particle ‘de’ in romanised
letters into the Chinese title – a tongue-in-cheek imitation of hybridised language
use popular on Chinese Internet – further punctures the seriousness of any genuine
revolutionary fervour. As Zhang Wenzhi has pointed out, the linguistic and conceptual
paradox in the title creates a visual tension stimulating our thinking, reminding us of the
gap between ideal and reality (2016).
Situated in the long tradition of visual re-imaginings of the Peach Blossom Spring,
Xu Bing’s installation at once revives and betrays Tao Qian’s utopian vision. Part visual
spectacle, part philosophical contemplation, Xu Bing’s rock-and-plastic rendition
of the Peach Blossom Spring mixes kitsch with serious-minded high art. Whilst
commenting on traditional landscape and sense of place affected by media technology
and globalisation, it also highlights the fact that contemporary uses of the past continue
to complicate and invigorate Chinese modernity. Whereas Shitao’s and Zhang Daqian’s
Peach Blossom Springs continued along a pictorial tradition by reusing and updating
a visual iconography from the past, Xu Bing recontextualises a local (Chinese) visual
iconography in deliberately chosen global and transnational environments. The once-
lost Chinese utopia is now not only recovered, recreated, and reclaimed as contemporary
art; it is also transported, exported, re-imported, put on prominent display for public
consumption, and indeed, available for private purchase. Crossing temporal, spatial
and conceptual boundaries, Xu Bing’s Peach Blossom Spring oscillates between self-
orientalisation and Chinese triumph in the global system of contemporary art.
60 Luo Hui

Figure 10: Xu Bing, Taohua yuan de lixiang yiding yao shixian 桃花源 de 理想一定要实现,
2016. The Olympic Water Park, Beijing.

The Peach Blossom Spring and Chinese Visual Modernity

The Peach Blossom Spring paintings provide an illuminating case study which enables
us to trace the subtle shifts in the long history of Chinese visual art, particularly
how artists responded to tradition, both as a concept and as a body of accumulated
images. And it is in the sense of how different artists responded to tradition that the
Peach Blossom Spring might be usefully linked with the discussion of Chinese visual
modernity. Shitao, Zhang Daqian and Xu Bing’s respective visual representations of the
Peach Blossom Spring are manifestations of Chinese visual modernity, each revealing a
distinctive way of relating to tradition while responding to the changes and necessities
of its historical and cultural conditions. In this sense, the Peach Blossom Spring can
be seen as an open metaphor for ‘tradition’ or ‘Chinese tradition’, and each artistic
rendering highlights different aspects of Chinese visual modernity.
Shitao might be considered a painter that came at the tail end of the literati
tradition, or he could be one of the first modern painters, as Jonathan Hay would argue.
Shitao’s Peach Blossom Spring breaks free from a staid, repetitive pictorial tradition of
Taoyuan tu paintings depicting paradisiacal scenes, and injects it with deeply personal
meaning, turning Tao Qian’s utopia from an unattainable ideal to an irretrievable past.
Zhang Daqian’s Peach Blossom Spring pays homage to the same Taoyuan tu tradition
that Shitao subtly rejected. Remaining reverential to traditional iconography, Zhang’s
Taoyuan tu is made poignant by his perpetual longing for home whilst living a life of
exile – a longing also expressed through his obsession with Chinese gardens (Bade
Yuan) and iconic Chinese landscapes (Mount Lu). He brings us back to the original
question: does the Peach Blossom Spring actually exist; and if so, where? Xu Bing
continues with this question and makes it more explicit, whilst extending it beyond
China by asking it on a global scale: is the Peach Blossom Spring metaphorical or
actual? And why should it not be actual or actualised? Xu’s intervention comes from
his focus on the public, social and political dimensions of the Peach Blossom Spring
by insisting on recreating and reconfiguring a utopian ideal. Like Shitao and Zhang
Daqian, he too departs from the mythical, paradisiacal vein of the Taoyuan tu tradition
and returns it to a complex network of (global) social realities.
From home to utopia, and back again 61

Wu Hung identifies five ways of “internalizing tradition”, a range of strategies

that contemporary Chinese artists have deployed in their “conversation with tradition”
– analytical transformation, distilling materiality, translating visuality, refiguration,
and image appropriation. (Wu 2014: 331) Xu Bing’s “conversation with tradition”
in his earlier works can be understood in one category or another — Wu Hung
describes Book from the Sky and Ghosts Pounding the Wall as typical examples of
“analytical transformation”; Background Story fits well with Wu Hung’s definition
of “translating visuality”. However, Xu’s Peach Blossom Spring does not seem to
fall neatly into any category. Xu’s visual representation of a classical Chinese text,
in an emphatically ahistorical, transnational context, clearly suggests an ambitious
“analytical transformation”; his use of physical material and his configuration of the
Peach Blossom Spring as a miniature Chinese garden, or a super-sized bonsai, could
also be understood as forms of “distilling materiality”, or “translating visuality”, or
“refiguration”. If there is any common ground that is shared by all these threads of
“conversations with tradition”, it is a double-edged critical stance towards both tradition
and modernity itself. Conversations with tradition, according to Wu Hung, must either
render traditional forms meaningless or exposes its limitations, or use traditional forms
from the past to critique the present. Xu Bing’s Peach Blossom Spring leans towards the
latter, gentler and more hopeful, form of critique, one that turns Chinese tradition into
a source of cultural capital in the operations of a globalised contemporary art world.

Glossary
Bade yuan 八德園
Lushan 廬山
Shitao 石濤
Taohua yuan ji 桃花源記
Taoyuan tu 桃源圖
Tao Qian 陶潛
Xu Bing 徐冰
Zhang Daqian 張大千

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Biographical Note
Dr Luo Hui is a senior lecturer in Chinese in the School of Languages & Cultures at Victoria
University of Wellington. His research interests include cross-cultural representations of
Chinese literary and visual culture, translation studies and contemporary uses of the
past. He is Director of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation.