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This talk examines twelfth- and thirteenth-century Chinese landscape paintings featuring prominently a human figure in the act of looking or gazing to illuminate why the portrayal of a beholder was important at this historical moment, to this degree, and how its depiction complicates the prevailing understanding of Southern Song landscape art as mainly evoking an idyllic tranquility. Drawing on a variety of leisure and entertainment experiences captured in period texts, this study will ask how the dramaturgical and performative characteristics of sightseeing experiences informed and shaped the aesthetic fascination with envisioning oneself as a beholder/actor faced with a spectacle. By questioning some of the assumptions about the drastic shifts in landscape painting practices from the late Northern to the Southern Song, this talk attempts to explain the prevalence of the act of gazing and the Southern Song landscapes framing such viewers in primarily theatrical terms.

Meng Zhao is a postdoctoral fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. She specializes in the art and visual culture of imperial China, with a focus on painting practices of the middle period and early modern times. Her current book project, “Roaming, Gazing, Halting: Human Presence and Sensory Impression in Song Landscape Painting (1185-1279),” investigates the related ways in which major Chinese landscapists from the end of the eleventh to the thirteenth century turned their attention to the portrayal of human presence, the intervention of which brings to the fore the multivalent mediating spaces that landscape as a pictorial subject can offer in Song dynasty artistic practices. Before joining the LRCCS, she received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2022.