Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 6, 2025

Between Inside and Outside: Towards a Chinese landscape Aesthetics

(Abstract)

Tang Yonghua

Chinese landscape aesthetics is neither a localized version of Western landscape aesthetics nor a modern iteration of ancient landscape thought. Rather, it is a theoretical discourse developed in tandem with China’s evolving modern experience of landscape. Chinese landscape aesthetics remains in a state of becoming—it has always unfolded, and will continue to unfold, through multilayered and multidirectional reflection on the interplay between ancient and modern, Chinese and Western. This process nurtures both its theoretical and practical wisdom. In the lived experience of “inside and outside,” Chinese landscape aesthetics must continually renew its understanding of the “discovery of landscape” and seek discursive logics capable of bridging past and present. In the cultural sphere, it must draw on diverse cross-domain experiences to refine a discursive strategy that integrates Chinese and Western perspectives. In the context of modernity, it must repeatedly assess the relationship between shanshui (mountains and waters) and landscape across various forms of landscape writing, in order to reconstruct the temporal structure of landscape experience in China and to recover the historical consciousness of aesthetics as a modern knowledge discourse.