The Making of a Medium: Borrowing Views from Painting and Fiction in Early Modern Chinese Garden Design

The Huntington Library hosts a talk on the first Chinese works to consider garden design an art.

S.E. Kile, assistant professor of Chinese literature at the University of Michigan, examines the first two Chinese works that considered garden design as an art: Ji Cheng's Yuanye (Fashioning Gardens, 1631–34) and Li Yu's Xianqing ouji (Leisure Notes, 1671). By excavating the garden's relationship to other art forms, Kile presents an account of the garden as a medium of artistic expression in early modern China.