[continued]
Artists and scholars in the East were generally regarded as the conscience of society and conveyors of its legacy. In ancient China the artist — wenren, or “the person with ultimate knowledge of the arts,” was simultaneously a scholar or scientist, a statesman, as well as an artist accomplished in a variety of artistic media. As the qualifications for wenren actually approximate those for shengren, or the sage, we might assume what is expected of the latter may also apply to the former. One of the earliest history texts, Lushi Chunqiu, states that “the sage is deeply concerned about the society,” while Yi Jing quotes from Confucius that “the sage learns from the processes of transformation in nature.” Creativity was therefore a matter of necessity, and a point along the continuum of cultural evolution. While creativity was one of the responsibilities of wenren, the most significant duty was to continue the heritage. As it is said in Yijing, “when dao reaches the end, it transcends, and persists.” The continuation of heritage is therefore a process of transformation as well as evolution. Or, as the Tang poet Han Yu (768-824) puts it “the process of learning from ancient masters is to study the meaning, not the rhetoric.”
According to the ancient sages, the source of creativity is to be found in one’s heritage; to revitalize the legacy of a culture thus requires responding to stimuli coming from both within and outside the culture.
In all of Asia, heritage has drastically declined since the onset of colonialism. Creativity in the East is now equated with imitation of the West. Worse, commercialized entertainment in the West is mistaken for creative expression in the East, compounding the effect of loss of cultural memory. This is especially unfortunate at a time when cultural diversity is the only means to counteract the sweepingly homogenizing effect of economic globalization.
Asia needs to emphasize continuation as well as development in culture. Without a revival of one's heritage, the current surge of creativity in Asia is a drain on its talent and a false manifestation of its cultural capacity. When cultural legacies are vibrant again, imitation will give way to assimilation, and creativity will once again be the source of cultural renewal. Only then, the richness of these revivified cultures will interact with Western cultures, leading to a genuinely global new era.
The wenren spirit is at once Chinese and universal — Chinese in that it is a unique institution responsible for more than two millennia of China’s cultural and social life, and universal in that it stands for commitment to true quality and deep sincerity, to independence, honesty and courage.