We could define atmosphere as “what passes through and allows to pass”. “In Chinese thought – François Jullien writes – what we call “real” (reifying it) is conceived in terms of flurry, respiratory flow (qi: to translate it as “energy” is still too Greek)”; it is rather “the “in-between” [that] from which/through which every event proceeds and unfolds”.2 In China, landscape painters have always been particularly sensitive to atmospheric qualities, expressed through concepts that merge rather than divide: shan-shui (literally mountain-water) and feng-jing (wind-light) highlight the compenetration that renders undivided, that disseminates and animates like the wind, or transforms solid into fluid, like a mountain transfigured into aqueous dissolution.