Landscape without nature: Ecological reflections in contemporary Chinese art

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 becomes visible only through the mediation of metaphors and imagery, this article also stresses the role aesthetics plays in our interactions with the environment.