The past at the edge of the future: Landscape painting and contemporary places

In this article, I offer an ethnographic account of Wutong Shan, and engage landscape painting as an interpretative device. Wutong Shan represents a unique phenomenon of urban transformation in that its residents cultivate a life harkening back to a rural past in an attempt to build a utopia unfettered by the deafening noise of modernity, which can easily be found down the road in Shenzhen, China’s newest city. Similar to what landscape painters throughout history have created through image, Wutong residents create a world of retreat, escape and natural beauty in a space at the edge of the urban. Both a landscape painting and this ethnographic place are built through a set of creative acts, a sense of self-cultivation, and a desire for escape. In Wutong Shan, the other side of the creative process is a livable environment rather than an art object. One of the ways I read landscape painting to understand Wutong Shan is by thinking with contemporary Chinese art works that, through illusion, revisit the landscape in light of industrial urbanization. I bring together three strains of thinking: (1) my contemporary ethnographic research on Wutong Art Village, (2) understandings of Chinese landscape paintings and their associated conceptions of nature and utopia and (3) contemporary art that renegotiates the landscape form, analysed through the emergent field of eco-art history.