Nature East and West: Paul Klee's cosmos and the Japanese garden

The garden has in the history of Western culture been taken as the exemplar of the proper human interaction with the natural world. It has also exerted a profound pull throughout the history of Buddhist Japan, which has seen the development of the garden from a simulacrum of a heavenly paradise to an increasingly abstract art form that aims to provoke distinct spiritual reactions in viewers. Using the art of modernist painter Paul Klee, I will examine how the garden is used by both medieval Zen practicioners and a paradigmatic high modernist artist to interrogate the spiritual significance of the cultivated landscape. It is my contention that both the modernist painter and the Zen garden designers use the garden in order to demonstrate the inseparability of humankind from the natural order. They use abstraction within the garden to point to the ultimate evanescence of the contingent and specific, and draw attention to the metastable reality that both allows specific contingencies to emerge and causes their dissolution.