Responding to Environmental Destruction through Contemporary Shanshui Art: Li Huayi’s Uninhabited Landscapes and Yang Yongliang’s Overpopulated Cityscapes

This paper provides an ecocritical reading of Li Huayi (李華弌, born 1948) and Yang Yongliang’s (杨泳梁, born 1980) landscape works that reference centuries-old Chinese shanshui (山水, mountain-water) ink painting. In the paper I will argue that, despite representing two different states of nature as being in harmony and crisis, both artists equally convey the urgency of today’s climate change. I will further argue that the artists help reinvent not only contemporary Chinese shanshui ink art, but also global ecocritical art by showing that local cultural heritage forms and global socio-environmental issues can be critically applied together. Drawing from artist interviews and applicable theories (from ecocritical to decolonial), in the first two sections I give a close visual analysis of the artists’ representative works respectively, namely Li Huayi’s Dragon amidst Mountain Ridge (龙潜山脉, 2006–2009) and Yang Yongliang’s The Night of Perpetual Day (极昼之夜, 2014). In the final third section I proceed to offer a deeper comparative critical reflection on the two artists’ approaches to representing nature and implications of this within the wider field of global contemporary ecocritical studies. Via an extension, I will highlight the diversity of responses to environmental destruction in art from the Sinophone region, and what this means in the current Anthropocene age.