Countryside Borderscapes in Finland

This article focuses on a particular kind of fence (riukuaita) that visually fragmented the nineteenth-century rural landscape in Finland and deeply affected everyday mobility in the countryside. Expanding on observations made in a previous article, the first section situates earlier depictions of the Finnish countryside within the broader confrontation between classic and romantic landscape painting and presents the idea of a countryside transformed into a borderscape of sorts. The second section examines the cultural practices within the Alderman institution that sustained and administrated these borders and divisions. The third and final section explores how artists of the so-called Golden Age of Finnish Art depicted these bordescapes, and how it might affect the way we read and experience landscape paintings, especially when considered from the phenomenological perspective of actual and imaginary walking into the depicted scene.

Bodily Contemplation: On the Question of the Truth of the Perception of Physical Objects in Chinese Landscape Painting

This article analyzes the views of representatives of the scientific community on ancient Chinese landscape painting, emphasis is mainly placed on views that concern the spiritual qualities of landscape painting, as well as rethinking concepts that ignore the significance of sensual perception. Landscape painting is usually considered as a spiritual work of Taoism: landscape painting developed from Taoist thought, Taoist philosophy determined the identity of the artistic style and the inherent spirit of landscape painting. Moreover, some researchers even believe that bodily contemplation of landscape painting means setting the very original nature of mountains and waters, and the "knowledge of the truth" is a spiritual process that is more blocked by the human capacity for sensual perception. Some of the scientists completely deny the possibility and truth of sensual perception of physical objects in landscape painting. The author of this article believes that the spiritual component of landscape painting lurks precisely in the value of sensual perception, and bodily contemplation of mountains and waters is impossible without the participation of the body, clear confirmation of which we find in the ancient Chinese theory of arts. Ancient Chinese works of art traditionally had a close connection with sensual perception through bodily contemplation. This process is not simply about capturing object information, but when the subject takes an active part in the vision of the object, when the subject gives feedback to the object, and through acquiring the object its meaning is transmitted. Only through bodily contemplation, the individual can fully feel the artistic value of landscape painting, and Taoist philosophy thus gains a real existence in landscape painting, becoming a kind of emotional thinking.

Introduction

The chapters gathered in this volume are the product of a conversation at the Center for Global Ancient Art in the University of Chicago. They address a theme that has had exceptional trans-cultural traction for well over half a century in art history as a discipline—with long scholarly (“secondary”) and historic (“primary”) literatures as well as deeply established visual genres in both European and Chinese landscape painting. Likewise, landscape is a key issue in all areas of archaeology—from questions about the placement of monuments to the understanding of human interventions in natural topography through such methods as field archaeology....

Guo Xi on Painting the Invisible Gaze of the Dao

For the Song dynasty painter and theorist Guo Xi, Daoism runs like veins through his Lofty Appeal of Forests and Streams, helping it become one of the greatest works of landscape painting theory in China. This essay explores the influence Laozi and Zhuangzi had on Guo Xi's thought, paying particular attention to the latter's implementation of spirit, nature, and incompleteness. Guo Xi succeeded in giving these Daoist themes an aesthetic significance that had yet to be fully realized by his predecessors, while expounding them in a manner that remained faithful to the texts from which they were drawn. While Guo Xi was not the first person in China to employ the principles of Daoist philosophy in their discourse on landscape painting, his ability to synthesize them into a cohesive representation of the invisible gaze of the Dao led to his becoming one of the most eminent painters and aesthetic theorists in the history of Chinese aesthetics.

Interpretation of Li Gonglin Ecological View of Landscape Painting Based on Chinese Soil Smoke Culture

Objectives: Cigarettes are not goods that have existed in China since ancient times, but consumer goods that were introduced into China by western countries and accepted and developed by Chinese people in modern times. The application of Chinese soil smoke culture in Li gonglin’s landscape painting is studied in this paper. Methods: From the perspective of art history, landscape painters in the Northern Song Dynasty, as a prosperous period of Chinese art history landscape painting, thought deeply about painting from the artistic form of nature, and integrated their own view of environment into their creation, forming many landscape aesthetic paradigms. Results: This paper focuses on the interactive dialogue between the literati and the environment with the involvement of how space planning and governance are allocated. It is aimed at the global perspective in the Anthropocene and a local position in the Northern Song Dynasty. Localization is not only the exploration of the ecological approaches of China and the West in space, but also the integration of the past and the present, observing its ecological image from the perception and practice of traditional environmental aesthetics to the harmonious coexistence of modern cities and nature. Conclusion: Local tobacco is not a traditional local consumer product. Under the public’s praise, it has gradually formed a unique thing in China - cigarette culture. People in the society are not only the observers of the environment, but also the participants of the environment. Through the aesthetic configuration of the classification of environmental belonging space and the transformation of the image and vision into such realistic or ideal landscapes as “Longmian Villa”, it goes towards ecological holism. Therefore, from the perspective of environmental aesthetics research, Li Gonglin’s paintings have research value.

The Pictorial Paradigm of La Vallée: A Text-Image Reading of the Incipit of The Mysteries of Udolpho

In this article, Alice Labourg is dedicated to the question of pictoriality in the incipit of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Close formal analysis enables to understand how the pictorial impression many readers have felt is created through language and its generation of a powerful iconotextual landscape. Painting is embedded in the very fabric of the text through a pictorial writing which operates on two complementary modes, first on an iconic and figurative level which presents the reader with various picture-like scenes, then on a more diffused, semiotic dimension which translates painting as a plastic signifier within the linguistic materiality.

Materializing the Invisible: Landscape Painting in Viceregal Peru as Visionary Painting

Landscape painting in Peru typically does not receive much attention from critical dis-course, even though the adoption of the Flemish landscape by Andean viceregal painters became a distinctive feature of Peruvian painting of the second half of the 17th century. Considered a consequence of a change in the artistic taste of viceregal society, the landscape was perceived as a secondary element of the composition. In this article, we will analyze the inclusion of the Flemish landscape in Andean religious painting from another critical perspective that takes into account different spiritual processes that colonial religiosity goes through. We analyze how the influence of the Franciscan and Jesuit mysticism created a fertile ground where landscape painting could develop in Peru. The Andean viceregal painters found in the landscape an effective way to visualize suprasensible spiritual experiences and an important device for the development in Peru of a painting with visionary characteristics.

Woolfian Afterlives

This chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s catalysing role for artists working in non-verbal media, including the visual arts, music, dance, and design. An analysis of Woolf’s impact beyond the medium of her writing allows for a trans-historic and international study of her legacy, charting her influence from, for example, landscape painting in Cornwall to Japanese Butoh; and from North American opera to the Ballet Russes. The chapter will trace many of the vital and fluid connections between Woolf, her contemporaries, and those whose work she has inspired. In the visual arts, case studies include: Sara Barker, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Judy Chicago, Aleana Egan, Rebecca Horn, Laura Owens, and Patti Smith. The music of Edith Sitwell, Ethel Smyth, Dominick Argento, Indigo Girls, The Smiths, and Patrick Wolf is discussed alongside dance by Lydia Lopokova, Wayne McGregor, and Setsuko Yamada.