This article aims to discuss a discursive turn of Chinese visual arts, using landscape representations from old and contemporary photographs of China, as well as painting and film materials. The discussion starts from showing the differences of defining the term landscape between Western and Chinese painters, arguing that they point to two types of realism underpinned by two kinds of cultures of seeing. It then moves on to the anthropological analysis of the landscape and how this analytical framework is useful in terms of understanding the ‘emotive reality’ in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Lastly, the essay attempts to point out that this legacy has been inherited by contemporary Chinese visual arts in form of a ‘roots-searching’ sentimentality, either in explicit or implicit ways, participating in the construction of the new reality and identity recognised by and shapes contemporary Chinese artists.

Nature (ziran) has been a key concept in Chinese art, yet the ‘nature’ celebrated in Chinese shanshui paintings and gardens are already abstract inventions, bearing only tenuous connections with the physical world beyond human habitation and control. This article studies several contemporary ‘landscapes’ that are devoid of conventionally defined nature, including Yang Yongliang and Yao Lu’s deceptively traditional shanshui that are in fact collages of scenes of urban congestion and pollution, Zhan Wang and Zhang Jianjun’s use of industrial materials to manufacture objects that signify ‘nature’ in domestic settings, as well as Miao Xiaochun’s seemingly straightforward portrayals of modern life that employ the compositional principles of shanshui to create sensations of the surreal. Those works have been interpreted as critiques of urbanization and commodification, but the ecological sensibilities they embody, I argue, are meant to undo the binary between nature and culture. Through seductive yet subversive appropriation of the conventional representations of nature, they remove the concept from a ‘transcendental, unified, independent category’ and reveal it as diverse, malleable and intimate, at once subject to and elusive from human interventions. Showing that the physical world become visible only through the mediation of metaphors and imagery, this article also stresses the role aesthetics plays in our interactions with the environment.

In the spring of 2015, a series of shanshui landscapes by cartoon artist Feng Zikai decorated official China Dream posters in Shanghai, and could since then be encountered in the streets and subway stations of all major cities. While the dissemination of national values and active citizen participation in the government’s environmental modernization program is clearly the major trajectory, this rapprochement towards a formerly prosecuted artist concomitantly illustrates the current reorientation towards local traditions and cultural continuity in China’s state ideology and propaganda work. At the same time, the 2014/15 Shanghai arts scene contributed a number of avant-garde landscape art works that pronounced their creators’ concern about the environmental crisis. It will be argued that there is a subliminal dialogue between Xi Jinping’s project of landscaping the China Dream and the artists’ selective reclamation of shanshui aesthetics in their ecocritical approaches. Whereas the national propaganda machine strives to appease opposition against rampant industrial pollution and heritage demolition, the cultural sphere responds by taking the government’s tampering with traditional ethico-aesthetic principles at its word.

Topics in Chinese Landscape (Shanshui) Painting and Theory, IMFA Graduate Seminar, The China Academy of Art Spring, 2021 Instructor: Michael Cavayero, Ph.D. OVERVIEW: This course will introduce students to Chinese Landscape (Shanshui) painting’s historical development and early maturation period, paying particular attention to its nascent discourse and relevant theoretical sources. We will discuss and examine primary historical source texts, influential figures, and famous works that define the emergence, maturation, and zenith of this unique painting genre and understand its significance within the greater context of Chinese painting and art. We will begin with an introduction to Chinese Landscape painting’s theorized origins and relevant scholarship, continuing with discussions of its form’s artistic, theoretical, cultural, and religious evolutions and interpretations. We will integrate close readings of primary texts ad rem, student presentations, and analyze critical works from the early medieval period leading up to the later Song dynasty (13th cent.).

Shanshui (mountains and waters) has been an important form of artistic expression in Chinese art. Since the introduction of photography in the early 20th century, it has undergone several phrases of changes. From the works of photographic artists Lang Jingshan, Yao Lu and Yang Yongliang, this article explores how shanshui aesthetics has been re-appropriated from classical ink-and-water paintings to modern photography over the past century. Throughout the process, we will examine what has been created and lost in shanshui’s reinventions. It is argued that modern and contemporary shanshui, being re-appropriated in the form of photo collage/ composite photography, structures and shapes our perceptions through adopting multiple-point and trans-scalar perspectives. In the process, it has made some of the ideological ruptures visible, pushing shanshui to become more socially and politically reflexive in China’s times of transitions and crises. Unlike literati painters in the ancient times who deliberately avoided politics and instead immersed themselves in creating nature paintings as a form of escapism, Lang Jingshan’s composite photography subtly and intricately reflects the political ruptures experienced in China in the mid twentieth century. Entering the 21st century, the emerging Anthropocene discourse is quickly reshaping our perceptions and the way art represents human-nature relationships. Contemporary artists like Yao Lu and Yang Yongliang create photographic shanshui collages that represent the excessively urbanized environments and observe the environmentally challenged social reality from various perspectives and scales. From the political ruptures we see in Lang Jingshan’s works since the 1950s, to the ecological ruptures in the Anthropocene epoch as reflected in Yao Lu and Yang Yongliang’s works, shanshui evolves under the camera lens and continues to be redefined according to ideologies of the time. 山水是中國藝術中一個舉足輕重的概念。自二十世紀初攝影技術引入中國後，山水經歷了幾個階段的演變。本文將透過藝術家郎靜山、姚璐和楊泳樑三人的攝影作品，探討山水美學在過去一世紀如何從傳統水墨畫被挪用到現代攝影之上。我們將探討山水被再創造的得與失。現當代山水是如何運用拼湊攝影/集綿攝影的技術去營造散點透視法和跨維度視界？同時，它們又如何讓我們更清楚從山水看到意識形態上的斷裂，從而反映中國當今社會和政治的轉變和困境。 有別於刻意歸隱和避世的古代文人畫家筆下去政治化的山水，郎靜山的集錦攝影暗示了他所處之世的政治斷裂和動盪。踏入二十一世紀，人類世話語的出現不但改變了人們對生態環境的感知，也改變了藝術呈現人與自然關係的方式。姚璐和楊泳梁所創作的山水集錦攝影反應當今社會過度城市化，亦透過不同的角度和維度直觀社會現實中遭受的生態環境衝擊。從上世紀五六十年代中國的政治分裂，到當今人類世衍生的生態裂縫，我們看到山水在攝影藝術家鏡頭下不斷演化，並受着不同的意識形態影響而被再三定義。

[PROOFS] The Nanjing decade (1928–1937) was marked by relative, albeit tenuous political stability, and nation-building efforts that encompassed infrastructure projects as well as cultural aspects. The improvement of transport came hand in hand with the swift expansion of the tourist sector. As travel became an increasingly affordable leisure activity, it was widely covered in the press media. At the same time, Chinese culture and landscape were reconceptualized in nationalist terms. Besides written reportages, the dual process of touristic exploration and national re-imagination of China’s land was visualized in the medium of photography. This process also led to a re-conception of what constitutes a typically Chinese landscape, which was largely mediated through photographs published in pictorials such as Liangyou. Since photographers who strove to create a photographic mode with national characteristics looked for models in premodern ink painting, their reimaginations also encompassed a reinterpretation of Chinese landscape painting as paintings of mountains and, more importantly, waterscapes.

This monograph is the third book from the Cofrin Asian Art Manuscript Series published by the University Press of Florida. The preceding monographs are Original Intentions: Essays on Production, Reproduction, and Interpretation in the Arts of China (2012), and Collectors, Collections, and Collecting the Arts of China: Histories and Challenges (2014). 1 This long awaited book, a collection of Professor Vanderstappen's annotated research and lectures, marks an important contribution, not only to the subject of Chinese landscape painting in general, but also to the current state of the study of Chinese art. !It is, however, not untouched by sadness for both the author and editor passed away before the book's publication. Father Vanderstappen (1921-2007), in particular, stands as an important figure in the early study of Chinese art in the U.S. 2 The monograph consists of an Introduction followed by seven chapters, of which the seventh serves as the Conclusion. The Introduction lays out the key ideas and interpretations of Vanderstappen in the formation and construction of Chinese landscapes. Vanderstappen defines two themes in Chinese landscape painting: tiandi, 天 地 (literally "heaven and earth,# or "cosmos#) and ziran 自然 ("self-existent#). Tiandi is a world in which we live, and ziran is a world that is invisible; these two realms constitute the key thematic ideas in Chinese landscapes. In order to truly achieve resemblance to

This exhibition will be held in three rotations in the Chinese Painting Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Each rotation will feature about fifty paintings and about thirty-five works of decorative art. The artworks span in date from the Song dynasty to the present day. For a detailed introduction to the thematic groupings, along with an object list for Rotation One (August 26, 2017-January 7, 2017), please download the attached document.

This paper examines Lang Jingshan’s landscape photography in its historical and political contexts. Tracing Lang’s oeuvre from Shanghai to Chongqing to Taiwan, it also studies how the pictures were commissioned, made, and perceived. I argue that Lang’s photographic art, often considered to be unoriginal and conservative or utopian escapism removed from reality, has in fact engaged with the political and historical turmoil of the times.