for what we're translating into English as "landscape."

And it's important to see the Chinese

and to understand what it's about because once one starts

to see the term in Chinese, one begins

to realize how different this must be

from what we mean by "landscape."

For example, here I am in Chicago teaching,

and as David Roy, who retired from University of Chicago used to say,

if you have x-ray vision, you will not see mountains in Illinois.

So in the Chinese tradition then, if you went out

to the cornfields of Illinois and you painted the landscape

that you saw, it would not be considered this.

Because the Chinese terms "mountain"--

or mountains because the Chinese doesn't differentiate singular

or plural here-- and you could think of it as meaning both

simultaneously, mountains and water, quite literally, shan shui.

So when we look at the emergence of what

becomes a great classical traditional Chinese landscape

painting in the 10th and 11th centuries when it does

emerge I'll show you some earlier images that

have mountains and streams in them.

You have to have mountains.

If there are no mountains, it's not landscape painting.

And I have some slides that talk a little bit about yin yang

because it's important in the context

of earlier Chinese landscaping.

There is a kind of a yin yang implication

here where mountains and water or rivers and streams

refer to two inclinations or tendencies in nature.

That is to say that mountains are expressive of the tendency

of things to grow high, to grow up towards the sky, to be solid,

to change slowly because mountains do change, and to be hard.

Water, on the other hand, flows downward, softer.

It turns into mist.

It's not graspable.

It's more open to dramatic changes.

So they complement each other.

So mountains and streams become mutually entailing

complementary expressions of the whole world of nature.

And one doesn't encounter really the equivalent,

at least in the texts I've encountered,

for the English word "nature," either.

You'll find terms like mountains and streams or rivers and forests

and so on, but the all-encompassing term "nature"

is another matter altogether.

This is an early example of mountains and water.

This is not really landscape.

It's a cast bronze incense burner, quite a spectacular object

excavated in the late 1960s by Chinese archaeologists

from a tomb of a Han Dynasty imperial prince,

Prince Liu Sheng, who died 113 B.C.E.

And this is something that was buried with him.

And it's a mountain island.

So this down here depicted in inlaid gold in these scroll forms

are patterns of water.

The term that we could use, at least at this time, we can call this chi.

Chi could be vapor.

It could be patterns of vapor.

It could be clouds.

It could be the forms of mountains.

It can be also the forms of water.

So in this particular context, this is water and water that swirls up.

And it almost turns into these oddly-shaped peaks.

There are actually holes cast in and among the mountain peaks

so that when the incense is lit, you can imagine

the smoke of the incense swirling around these peaks.

So an incense burner that was buried with Prince Liu Sheng.

Usually identified as one of the legendary islands of immortals,

mountain islands of immortals, one of three

that exist somewhere off of the Northeast coast of China.

The interest in mortality and longevity

was important for Han Dynasty culture

and also for later Chinese culture and Daoism in particular.

But I wanted to put the character for "immortal"

that we're translating as "immortal" down here, which

is literally a person on the left next to a mountain.

A mountain person is immortal.

So just by way of introduction, the notion of mountains and streams

is connected with a long history of, let's say interest,

and what we call it simplistically, cult of immortality, request

for longevity in ancient Chinese culture.

This is a probably copy of an early original painting.

This is just the detail of a hand scroll, ink and color

on silk, that is attributed to a painter named Gu Kaizhi, who

was living and working in the 300s, dying around about 406

in the common era.

And the subject is a poem, so this is an illustration of a poem.

The poem is the immortal-- sometimes immortal-- nymph of the Luo River.

And there she is set in a landscape.

Mountains and then we have streams here.

And she's floating above the streams and so

we have again immortality associated with the world of mountains

and streams here in an illustration of a poem.

We move into a Buddhist context.

And this will be pushing into the sixth century,

into the middle of the sixth century.

This is just a small detail of wall paintings in a cave sanctuary,

a cave shrine, a part of a monastic site, a Buddhist shrine out--

and I showed you slides for that before the break--

out in the Gobi Desert near Dunhuang.

Cave 249, mid-sixth century.

And it shows here this is an element of the sky.

And there's actually a Chinese sky god immortal, though identified

in this context as the god Indra.

And then all sorts of other deities and denizens of the sky realm.

And then down here the world of mountains

picked out in mineral blue and some brown ink.

And with a hunting scene here.

So this is the world of mountains and streams down below.

In another Buddhist context, mid-eighth century,

this is again the small detail from a larger mural.

And the mural's basically Buddhist subject matter, Buddhist narrative

subject matter.

So now we have mountains that are strung together

in sequences of overlapping forms, conical shapes

that are layered together to create a sense of mountain ranges

where the mountains and also zigzagging streams

are ways of framing a narrative, which is then identified

by these blanks here that the text is now gone.

So making the subject matter of this narrative a little bit

obscure although thought perhaps the depictions of the pilgrimage

of the early Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang be depicted here.

Others have suggested these are illustrations of fables and tales

from the Lotus Sutra.

Peter started out his talk with a parable from the Lotus Sutra.

Anyway, so mountains in mineral blue and green here now.

We're pushing into the 10th century.

We start seeing the emergence of what

we can call landscape painting per se.

And this is a painting that has some controversy about it.

And I'm one who thinks it's an early painting, and others,

my colleagues don't agree with me about it.

This is a painting that's in the Nelson Atkins

museum in Kansas City.

And I think it's battered, it's beat up.

It's been restored and has some old restoration on it.

And some of the paint has flaked off.

We don't really know what the title might have been.

It's generally just called "Travelers

in a Mountain Landscape."

It's attributed to this 10th century artist Jing Hao.

Also, we have some writing surviving, supposedly

written by Jing Hao on landscape painting.

This is not a large painting.

I don't remember.

I didn't have with me handy the actual dimensions,

but I remember the image may not be much larger than this.

So it's not a really large hanging scroll.

What I want to do is show you some details of this image

and then start to lay out what I call some of the conventions

or some of the vocabulary of 10th and 11th century landscape painting

to familiarize you with the language,

the visual language of it.

Also keeping in mind that the language of this painting is full

of an inherent-- emerges as an inherited practice, just the way

the writing system in calligraphy works.

And you have the eight basic brush strokes,

and you have a stroke number and order

when you're writing in a character.

You also have patterns of practice.

We have structuring, improvised practice that is very much

a part of the landscape painting tradition.

Now I called some of the things I'm going to describe conventions,

but I haven't come up with a better word for it

because convention sounds so absolute.

You know it's like, these are the rules,

and you have to follow these rules, and this is how you do it.

It's much more open-ended than that.

There are sort of inherited patterns of ways of arranging compositions,

of subject matter, of including certain kinds of motifs,

that are not absolutely defined.

The texts don't actually describe them.

I'm going to actually articulate them for my own cataloging of them.

But they're open-ended and so that there

are ways of structuring organization into the present moment unfolding.

And in the creative unfolding of that moment,

those very structures that beget your participation in that moment

can actually then themselves be changed

by how you realize them in that moment.

So no real absolute rules about this,

although it seems that there are a lot

of apparent prescriptions in painting.

Here's a detail of the lower part of the painting.

You see here.

And there are people in it and the people

are all in this ghostly white.

And that's because a lot of the detail has flaked off,

and this is lead white pigment.

So this is a mountain landscape, perhaps even

might have been meant as a winter landscape given

all the presence of the lead white here, with small people floating

around, going about their business.

This is the upper part of the painting,

which has this grand mountain peak.

And then there is over here temple buildings.

These are palatial style architecture, timber frame

architecture, and the presence of temple buildings

is in gorges and valleys and mountains

is one of the kind of conventional motifs

that recur in 10th and 11th century landscape painting

and then later landscape paintings.

I've taught this material for so long

I ended up sort of evolving a phrase to describe this convention.

Temple buildings nestled in the gorge

partially obscured by mist and trees.

I have to find -- and I realized I was saying this over and over

and over again, and students were memorizing it.

I would get these essay exams back and they'd say,

temple buildings nestled in the gorge partially

obscured by mist and trees.

And one graduate student made an art project out of it

where she asked me to translate it into,

of all things, classical Chinese and read it in Chinese

and then read it in English.

And then she refragmented it, and so there's

my voice for 10 minutes going on repeating this phrase.

So there we have it.

Temple buildings nestled in the gorge

partially obscured by mist and trees.

Trees down at the bottom here, and this is a detail

so you get some people there.

That's right here.

And this man is also a kind of a recurring motif.

He showed up in the blue and green Tang Dynasty landscape.

I suggest it might be referring to the story

of a pilgrimage of Xuanzang.

There was a image of a man with a broad-brimmed hat on a horse.

Well, here's an image of a man on maybe a horse but possibly a mule.

Eventually it's become standard that he rides a mule,

and he has a broad-brimmed hat.

He's emerging from behind the slope.

And this recurs in a lot of Chinese landscape paintings later.

He becomes poeticized.

He becomes a kind of trope for the lone wanderer,

wandering among mountains and streams,