Before climate policy, there was landscape painting—how visual culture illustrated ecological concerns in imperial China.
Sustaining Landscapes: Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture, 960–1368 CE examines the ecological thinking embedded in the rise of Chinese landscape genre in relation to state finance, natural resource management, and geospatial knowledge. It traces the pre-industrial notion of “sustainability” in policy debates, legal regulations, and arts. Landscape imagery on paintings, maps, as well as mass-produced artifacts such as fans and ceramic pillows documented both appropriate and exploitative use of natural resources and critiqued social inequity and political turmoil. This book breaks new ground by bringing together research on visual and material culture with analysis of politics and ecology. Wang argues that the Chinese landscape genre embodied a holistic approach to negotiating debates on human-nature interdependence and people-state relationships. It joins the increasing literature on ecocriticism and offers alternative perspectives to address contemporary challenges, ranging from environmental crisis to global governance.
