Kai Marchal of National Cheng-chih University and Michael Forster of Bonn University have organized a conference this week on “Chinese Aesthetics and the Art of Landscape Painting”; details are here. The organizers describe their goals as follows:

Traditional Chinese landscape painting is a paradigmatic genre of Chinese art. The “Chinese literati ideal” of artistic production is closely associated with the painting of mountains, rivers, trees, bamboo, pavilions and other elements of what we today simply call landscapes. We presume that the reconstruction of any aesthetic tradition and theory always requires actual aesthetic experience on the spot. Instead of merely discussing aesthetic theorems in a general and highly abstract way, we want to take the experience of actual Chinese landscape paintings as a starting point for further discussion. We thus hope to foster a dialogue between more conceptually driven approaches to Chinese art and more specialized, sinological ones.