Ink wash virtualities in Qing landscape painting

Abstract This study considers virtuality in Qing ink wash landscape paintings via an album by Pan Gongshou (1741–94). We examine the painterly devices by which a liminal, ‘virtual,’ space is constructed as a ‘realm’ or world in which the viewer is synaesthetically absorbed into a landscape image. Landscape in this tradition is not a pure creation of the human gaze, nor a representation of material elements and topography. We examine the painterly devices through which a sublime loss of critical distance is linked to the represented elements to absorb the viewer into what Wang Guoweii (1877–1927) proposed as a ‘realm without self.’ Virtualities are intangible but real; they supplement material elements that are represented, changing their meaning and affect. These qualities are at the heart of a geometry of gazes and relations that compose the visual experience of a virtual landscape.