Chinese Environmental Aesthetics

As an independent modern humanities discipline, aesthetics is an essential part of philosophy. Environmental aesthetics is the application of aesthetic theory in the field of environmental studies. Its research objective is the aesthetic appreciation of all kinds of environments (natural and built) and the various things they contain, and it advocates for a view of the harmonious coexistence between people and the environment. Chinese scholars’ contact with environmental aesthetics began in the 1990s. On the one hand, it has been deeply influenced and inspired by Western scholarship, which has provided important references and resources; on the other hand, it is shaped by its specific historical, social, and cultural context, such as the long tradition of Chinese aesthetic appreciation of environments, the awakening of people’s environmental awareness, their increasing attention to environmental issues in China and around the globe, the concepts of “ecological civilizations” and “Beautiful China” as national policies, and so on. All these have effectively prompted Chinese scholars to excavate and reinterpret traditional Chinese environmental aesthetics, consider its contemporary significance, and construct and develop new perspectives. Chinese environmental aesthetics was officially born in 1993 and has had a development history of 30 years as of 2023. After more than 3 decades of academic accumulation and unremitting effort, Chinese scholars have conducted a comprehensive and systematic study of both Western environmental aesthetics and the history of Chinese environmental aesthetics and have thoroughly explored the basic nature, theoretical framework and ideas, core categories, main theses, relations with neighboring fields, practical paths, and future prospects. In particular, different branches of environmental aesthetics such as urban, agricultural, or rural have been explored, as well as identifying and reflecting on the relationship between environmental aesthetics and other related fields such as environmental ethics, ecological aesthetics, and life aesthetics. Different from Western environmental aesthetics, Chinese environmental aesthetics identifies the research objective as “environment appreciation,” constructs the theoretical system as a framework, and then forms the aesthetic model of “what–how–why–how” and the new three-dimensional aesthetic paradigm of “body–mind–environment.” Chinese scholar Chen Wangheng analyzed the “sense of home” implicit in the concept of “environmental beauty” from the perspective of environmental aesthetics. These are all unique theoretical contributions and theoretical values. More importantly, Chinese environmental aesthetics shoulders the mission of promoting the concept of an “ecological civilization,” and its ideological theme should be expanded from the concept of “beautiful China” to “beautiful world” to actively and proactively engage in academic dialogues with Western environmental aesthetics. It also explores and enriches contemporary ecological wisdom and strives to highlight the creativity and cosmopolitan nature of Chinese environmental aesthetics in international environmental aesthetics.