Mountains and Waters: Art and Ecology in East Asia

Catalog description

For more than a millennium, painters and poets across East Asia have acclaimed soaring peaks astride expansive rivers as the most sublime of all subjects. Often termed “landscape” in modern English, these images of “mountains and waters” (shanshui) offer fascinating insights into the ways in which what we now call “the environment” was conceptualized in premodern East Asia. Drawing upon recent eco-aesthetic perspectives, this seminar examines these celebrated monuments of East Asian painting as ecological entities, investigating their relationships with the human and nonhuman beings that participated in their reproduction, and interrogating the moral implications of their enduring appeal. First year seminar