The landscape of the Void: truth and magic in Chinese landscape painting

ABSTRACT

While landscape can be explored through the discourse of language and materiality, the enchantment of landscape remains ambiguous. In trying to unconceal the magic of landscape, this paper turns to the connection between Heidegger’s phenomenology and Chinese Daoism through the concept of landscape as the painted picture. Using the literal meaning of the Chinese landscape as the ‘scene of the wind’, or rather the scene of the invisible, I explore how landscape can be understood through the combination of Heideggerian hermeneutics and Chinese Daoism as the literal and metaphorical Void between mortality and divinity, earth and sky. Traditional Chinese landscape painting, as the Daoist philosophy in portraying the essence of truth in nature and life, is contrasted with Western Romanticism and Ruskin’s ideals of art as truth. Through the disturbance of what is subject and object, as well as what is visible and invisible in the perception of landscape, I conclude that the magic of landscape lies in the paradox: the between state where logic is inversed, where the Void is nothingness, where truth is sought and where belief is magical.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese landscape painting
• Heidegger
• phenomenology

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Mora Campbell and Professor Ted Goossen for their reading recommendations. This paper is also indebted to Professor Shubhra Gururani for her insightful lectures on new materialism. Finally, this paper could not have been completed without Professor Jay Goulding, who introduced me to the ‘Void’ that exists between Heidegger and Eastern philosophy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Van Thi Diep is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She studies landscape aesthetics and phenomenology as alternative approaches to landscape architecture praxis. After graduating with a Bachelor of Architectural Science from Ryerson University and a Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto, Van Thi Diep practiced as a landscape architect in Toronto before completing her MA in Humanities at York University.

Notes

1 See Sears (2013), ‘Character: 谷’ for ancient scripts of the Chinese character.