During our visit to many of the museums and exhibitions in Italy and Germany, I have found myself especially attracted by landscape paintings. I have many quick answers to the question “why I love landscape painting”: because I study biology and enjoy ecology the most; because I spent my childhood living next to a forested hill; because I am from China, a place with profound landscape painting culture.

Even though landscape painting has already been developed as an artistic genre by Dutch during the Golden Age, but it remains as a lower type of art without much importance in the Fine Arts world. It has always been considered as a genre to show off skills, and purely for decoration, but with hardly any insight to the meaning of life and society. It is Caspar David Friedrich, along with other Romanistics painters that first aligned landscape paintings with the inner world of human and religious transcendent realm; thus attach landscape paintings to those “important” topics of religion and human life.

During my visit to the museum palast in Dussordolf, I was excited to see a solo show for a 19^th century German landscape painter, Andreas Achenbach, and his political involvement. But to my disappointment, the show divides his career as a landscape painter and a politic activist. There is no connection made between the two genres of art the artist practiced, and no attempt to read his works interrelated to each other. The argument made in the exhibition is that even though a famous, and high-skilled landscape painter, he had another aspect of life making politic caricatures. Thus it seems that there is still a permanent idea in the West to see landscape paintings for painting techniques and decorational values, unrelated to the social-political life of human society.

On the other hand, landscape painting is almost the most important artistic genre in East Asian culture. Not to record natural beauty onto paper, but through expressive strokes to evoke emotions and thoughts. Somehow aligned itself with calligraphy and more famously Zen Buddhism, landscape painting is (one of) the most historically and culturally profound art style. In the Splashed-Ink Landscape, we can see the features of abstraction that was highly praised in modern Western art world. Through landscape, artists talked about the art traditions they inherited, the religious tenets of Buddhism, and even sometimes mentioned the change in landscape by social-political trends in society. In the art circle of East Asian countries, famous landscape themes were copied and revisited by generations of artists. One of the themes is “Xiao Xiang Ba Jing”. The work by Chinese artist Hao Liang is the updated version of it in contemporary era. By adding a surrealistic attribute into the traditional landscape theme of XXBJ, the artist also innovated on the supporting material of fabric instead of paper. The work reminds me of the work “Moon Over Venice” designed a Japanese artist, Takeuchi Seiho in 1910. The work was sketched first with strokes and later reproduced into embroidery. A famous Western landscape of Venice, the sketch by Takeuchi is monochrome ink painting. Asian embroidery was also an important export product during that time in Japan. Both the work by Hao Liang this year, and the early 20^th century textile from Japan, are on the way of modernizing and Westernizing the culture of landscape painting in East Asia, to a broader international audience.

However, in the contemporary art world, landscape paintings have almost no place, probably already be labeled as outdated, superficial, and in general a typical slick art. The example mentioned before is in the trans-pavilion of “tradition” of this year’s Venice Biennale. In the cultural binary setting in that exhibition space, viewers are highly aware of the different cultural contexts and local stories the works are talking about, instead of the renovated art form of landscape painting that I belief have many potential unknown to the current art world.

In Documenta, there is another landscape painting series by Bangladesh artist, Ganesh Haloi that attracts my attention. Through the geometric shape of line, circle and triangle, the artist explored the complicated natural world of landscape, and created artworks on it using simple forms. Educated in Indian iconography and Buddhism, the landscape under Haloi’s hand, is not the direct record of the reality, but through his personal contemplation on the grand nature. A abstraction of real-life landscape and a reconstruction of symbolic icons, the works by Haloi seems modern in a Western sense, but his process of abstraction is unique in his cultural and educational background. Different from the two landscape painting culture I knew about (the European and the East Asian), this insight into landscape painting and its connection to broader topics is valuable in thinking about the position of landscape painting in current art world.