Sustaining Landscapes: Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture, 960–1368 CE by Gerui Wang is a richly illustrated work anchored by analysis of landscape depictions: “the quintessential form in Chinese art history” (p. 1). Like other ecocritical scholarship, this book uses art with ecological themes to identify something culturally and historically specific about how people thought about nature. As Wang explains, “landscapes can mobilize discussions of the politics of sustainability and power dynamics” (p. 161). During the Song and Yuan eras, works of landscape art reflected an era of unsettling ecological transformation, the commodification of labor and property, and disputation about proper policy toward such matters.
The book addresses these questions through the lens of what Wang calls sustainability, her translation for the Chinese terms buke shengyong 不可勝用 and weichi 維持 (pp. 2–3). In the Song, buke shengyong, a phrase from Mencius, referred to the potential for cultivating the inexhaustibility of both moral principle and aspects of the natural world. For example, Wang quotes a passage from Luo Yuan 羅願, author of the Xin’an Gazetteer (Xin’an zhi 新安 志), who cited Mencius to urge restraint and attunement to seasonality in Southern Song fishing and forestry (p. 14). By the Song, as Wang explains, buke shengyong and weichi had become conjoined to newer terms that did not have a Warring States provenance: governance (xiyuzheng 繫於政) and management (jingli 經理) (pp. 2–3).
Another of Wang’s keywords (invoked 81 times in the book) is “natural resources,” which does not have a single or clear referent in Chinese (both shanhai dize 山海地澤 and wuchan 物產 come up at various points as possibilities). Wang refers to phenomena as diverse as luxuries destined for Emperor Huizong’s pleasure gardens (p. 13), grain and timber (p. 14), and mist and snow (p. 17) as natural resources. In the framework of this book, landscape rendered in paintings is “a web of natural resources in which human activities take place” (p. 53).
Thus, this book is about Song–Yuan ecological thought through the lens of landscape art, but it is also about infrastructure governance, commodity production, disaster management, coupled social and ecological systems, and the conversion of lakes and wetlands to farmland. As Wang puts it, it is about “how texts, images, and objects reveal the tension between human needs and environmental limits” (p. 155). The book concerns contested ecological policies and practices refracted through landscape art: it is not a work of art history as such.
For example, when Wang invokes the accomplished Yuan painter Ren Renfa 任仁發, she focuses less on his lauded paintings of horses, flowers, and birds, and more on the fact that he also wrote hydraulic engineering treatises. It is intriguing to speculate, as she does, that his art practice and his waterworks commentary may have influenced one another, though she advances no unambiguous evidence that they did so (p. 127). Still, at the very least, as Wang puts it, they “shared overlapping discourses” (p. 154).
The search for resonances and shared discursive space between environmental commentary and landscape art is Wang’s core practice in this book. Each chapter concerns a different genre of landscape depiction: paintings, maps in gazetteers, illustrations on fans, and renditions on ceramic pillows. In each chapter, she scrutinizes visual forms for signs of ecological thought. For example, in the painting chapter, she explains how the ubiquity of bridge, boat, and lake imagery was an aesthetic choice and an artistic convention. However, she underscores the fact that it also evokes timber costs, wetlands drainage, and labor exploitation during an era when such topics were the subject of disputation at court and jeremiads in essays and poetry.
Labor and exploitation are persistent topics in the book. Wang explains that artists and patrons recognized class inequality in the context of land privatization, and that painters rendered the efforts of boatmen and farmers as toilsome labor under precarious conditions. She also emphasizes that landscape art was a commodity, not just an aesthetic object. Artisans were always workers, and during the Yuan era, some were ethnically Han individuals who could not serve as officials or were otherwise socially marginalized. Art purchasers, meanwhile, situated themselves in the market according to the works they could afford to own.
Wang seeks to avoid simplistically combing through artworks to search for hidden politics. She emphasizes instead that the works participated in heterogeneous worlds of ecological thought. In paintings and in society, nature was, variously, an object of aesthetic appreciation, a source of respite, a mnemonic for works of poetry and drama, a resource to be managed, a site of disaster, a location of labor, and a site of capital investment in land. Nature, society, and landscape art were all part of “an assemblage of contrasting perspectives and practices” (p. 1).
Taking this perspective, she invokes resonances rather than making a single argument about the politics of landscape in Song art. She favors language about how landscape art and environmental politics “parallel” (14 references) or “reflect” (55 references) one another. The contribution of the book is to register how art in various genres rendered social and ecological phenomena. Song fans depicted scenes of agriculture during an era of farmland expansion and land speculation, and Song maps, like Song paintings, portrayed trees in an age of deforestation. Landscape imagery on ceramic pillows “coincided with” an era of frequent natural disasters (p. 119).
But although Wang is reticent about proposing causal relationships between artistic images and social commentary, many of her interpretations of visual evidence are quite literal. In this book, winter always evokes hardship and struggle, bare trees are a symbol of want, and fishermen focused on their tasks are toiling under duress. I would have liked to have seen these assertions supported by documentation from middle-period art manuals or from contemporary scholarship in art history. Might the fact that some fans depict scenes of people “flourishing in fertile valleys,” while others show them “straining against a barren winter” (p. 84) be seasonal tropes rather than the latter being a critique of exploitation? When people beheld serene stock images of rivers and mountains, did they perceive a political message, or did they simply enjoy painterly illustration? Wang emphasizes that artisans made fans by the hundreds, with standard scenes, to support a commercial market (p. 87). This does not preclude them from embodying either social commentary or the spirit of an age, but it means that it is incumbent upon Wang to offer persuasive evidence in support of an interpretation that emphasizes social commentary.
I wonder also whether environmental social commentary in Song and Yuan landscape art was novel, and I wonder what changed during the 400-year period that the book covers. I would have liked to have learned when references to “governance” and “management” became connected to classical ecological concepts. As always, one question we historians must ask about the pasts we study is when we have identified a new phenomenon, and when we have instead discovered that an enduring cultural practice has become more visible to us because it has lasted into a time when the number of people and commodities, the amount of wealth, and the velocity of circulation and production have increased dramatically. Did Song landscape imagery become more highly valued or take on a more critical valence in visual representation, especially on everyday objects like fans and pillows, or is it simply the case that more items were produced in the first place, and that more remain extant today? After all, as Wang notes (pp. 122–3), plenty of Han and Tang incense burners, pottery, and other artifacts depicted mountains and landscape scenes long before the Song era.
Still, as I read this book, I remembered how little has yet been published on two interrelated topics in middle-period Chinese history: (i) ecological thought and environmental politics and (ii) the exploitation of people and of the natural world in the context of unequal wealth and power. In Sustaining Landscapes, Wang Gerui has done important work to bring attention to both topics and to explain how closely related they are to one another. For that, she is to be commended.
