Cultural Landscape

There exist a great variety of Landscapes that are representative of the different regions
of the world. Combined works of nature and humankind, they express a long and
intimate relationship between peoples and their natural environment.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/culturallandscape/
converging cultures
Throughout history, economic needs, material desires, and political ambitions have
brought people from different cultures and communities into contact, sometimes across
great distances. Whether clashes or cooperative endeavors, these convergences have
brought about the exchange of knowledge and ideas. In the visual arts, they have led to
creative juxtapositions, hybrid styles, innovative forms, and the reinterpretation of
traditional signs and symbols.
2 /dreams and visions
Art, of course, is about seeing. But it is not always about representing the world as it
exists, and sometimes it can allow us to see with more than our eyes. From Aboriginal
artists who paint the unseen forces of the universe to Surrealists who looked into the
recesses of the unconscious mind for inspiration, people have found many ways to
record ephemeral feelings, unknowable mysteries, personal fantasies, and inner
visions. At the same time, art has been used as a tool to inspire and guide dreams and
visions, both secular and spiritual.
Art has been a medium through which people have not only documented, but also
shaped historyboth past and future. Periodically, individuals, groups, and societies
have also drawn on or appropriated artistic forms of the past to make statements in and
about the present. Art can commemorate existence, achievements, and failures, and it
can be used to record and create communal as well as personal memories.

3 /history and memory

Art has been a medium through which people have not only documented, but also
shaped historyboth past and future. Periodically, individuals, groups, and societies
have also drawn on or appropriated artistic forms of the past to make statements in
and about the present. Art can commemorate existence, achievements, and failures,
and it can be used to record and create communal as well as personal memories.
http://learner.org/courses/globalart/theme/8/index.html

In the manner of Li Zhaodao (first half of the 8th c.), Ming Huang's Journey
to Shu
source

The Five Dynasties and Song periods witnessed a gradual shift in painting subject
matter in favor of landscapes. In earlier dynasties landscapes were more often the
settings for human dramas than primary subject matter. During the tenth and eleventh
centuries, several landscape painters of great skill and renown produced large-scale
landscape paintings, which are today considered some of the greatest artistic
monuments in the history of Chinese visual culture.
These landscape paintings usually centered on mountains. Mountains had long been
seen as sacred places in China--the homes of immortals, close to the heavens.
Philosophical interest in nature could also have contributed to the rise of landscape
painting, including both Daoist stress on how minor the human presence is in the
vastness of the cosmos and Neo-Confucian interest in the patterns or principles that
underlie all phenomena, natural and social.
The essays that have been left by a handful of prominent landscape painters of this
period indicate that pictures of mountains and water (shan shui, the literal translation of
the Chinese term for landscape) were heavily invested with the numinous qualities of
the natural world. Landscape paintings allowed viewers to travel in their imaginations,
perhaps the natural antidote to urban or official life.
Landscape painting was not entirely new to the Five Dynasties and Song. Most of the
landscapes painted during the Tang, such as the one above, were executed in blue and
green mineral-based pigments, which gave the painting surface a jewel-like quality.

Can you see the mountains in this painting as the homes of immortals?
http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/painting/4ptglnds.htm#4though1