Abstract
This article argues that late-Ming-era landscape paintings can be understood best historically in the context of such cultural practices as Daoist visualization and the discourses that accompanied it. Taking a Snowy Mountains-themed painting, it critiques the Cartesian perspective by demonstrating that landscape paintings were not regarded as closed objects available to the thinking subject for mere aesthetic appreciation. Instead, they were thought to possess an interiority that afforded space for the human spirit to roam in. A certain teleology associated with this practice was the merging of the beholder’s human body with that of a purported broader cosmic body, thereby also giving interiority to the physical world – including landscape. Access to this space, or, “entering the mountains,” allowed for a momentary yet reproducible experience of transcendence. To make this argument, the article draws upon late-imperial narrative prose, Daoist texts, and other materials from the same period, all describing the cultural significance of this pattern of interiority, accessibility, visualization, and merging of bodies.
Keywords
landscape, interiority, paintings of “mountains and water,” Daoism, art, ritual, visualization, Snowy Mountains
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