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Is it only through vision that we can perceive a landscape? Is the space opened by the landscape truly an expanse cut off by the horizon? Do we observe a landscape in the way that we watch a ´show´? What, ultimately, does it mean to ´look´? In this important new book, one of France´s most influential living theorists argues that the first civilization to truly consider landscape was China. In giving landscape the name ´mountain(s)-water(s)´, the Chinese language provides a powerful alternative to Western biases. The Chinese conception speaks of a correlation between high and low, between the still and the motile, between what has form and what is formless, between what we see and what we hear. No longer a matter of ´vision´, landscape becomes a matter of living. Francois Jullien invites the reader to explore reason´s unthought choices, and to take a fresh look at our more basic involvement in the world.

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