This seminar proposes to take the Yangzi River as a mainspring in understanding a history of Chinese landscape painting. The Yangzi River, with its waters running from the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai, through the Three Georges, to today's Shanghai, cultivates Chinese civilizations from Stone Ages to the present. During the second millennium, the development of Chinese landscape painting often corresponded to artists' experience with, and imagination of, the river's water systems. We will take a fresh look at how this happened over time, and how the correlation between painting-making and place-making consolidates an intertwined human-environment relationship. Among various issues we will discuss, we will pay close attention to investigating an aesthetics of water as well political ecology associated with the riverine art and culture. Beyond examining a plethora of paintings and related literary writings, students are expected to learn about historical geography and the ecological spheres of the Yangzi River that informed and inspired those artworks. Both undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to enroll.

HISTART Concentration Distributions: Early modern and China

Image: Zhao Fu, Ten-Thousand Miles of the Yangzi River, ca. 1160s-70s. Handscroll, ink on paper, 45.1 x 992.5 cm. Beijing: Palace Museum.