Art and the Environment

Nature as a Source of Inspiration and Meaning

While environmental conditions differ from place to place, contact with nature has been a universal human experience. It’s therefore not surprising that natural motifs—plants, animals, water, the sky—adorn works of art across all cultures and are a consistent source of inspiration and meaning.

Depictions of landscapes can serve as valuable documentation of specific places, but they can also evoke strong emotions. Images of the natural world can remind us of the beauty and power of nature, evoking feelings of tranquility, wonder, awe, and contemplation.

From the earliest Japanese poetry anthology, compiled in the eighth century, to the present day, the beauty of the Japanese landscape has been celebrated in literature and art. At first, landscapes were not an independent subject but were incorporated into the backgrounds of Buddhist paintings, seasonal subjects (shikinami-e), and paintings of famous scenic or sacred sites (meisho-e). Beginning around the thirteenth century, possibly through the influence of the introduction of new modes of ink painting from China and Korea, landscape became an independent subject in Japanese painting. Landscapes of Japan were most often, but not exclusively, painted in the full color mode, which effectively expressed the seasonal changes that are inextricably linked with natural imagery in Japanese poetry and art. Ink painting was usually chosen for varied and dramatic landscapes of China, which most Japanese artists understood through their study of imported paintings, and later, of painting manuals as well. Whether rendered in rich, deep colors or in subtle tones of ink, landscapes by Japanese artists are imbued with a sense of intimate understanding and appreciation of the transient beauty and spiritual significance of the natural world.

Travel to misty mountain valleys and foggy ocean beaches through the eyes of great Japanese artists from the sixteenth century on, accompanied by the sounds of the shakuhachi (bamboo flute), in this exploration of nature as an inspiration for Japanese art and music, guided by the virtuoso Kurahashi Yodo II and curator Frank Feltens:

For Chinese scholar-officials, viewing landscape paintings not only provided aesthetic delight, but a landscape setting was often vested with meaning, which could range from providing a clue about the season of the painting to conveying more complex meanings. Seeing an image of figures in a remote landscape often referred to the key cultural and political concept of eremitism. The literati, or scholar class, believed in the Confucian notion that government service was a high moral duty. However, if the emperor was corrupt, or if a scholar was faced with serving a dynasty founded by usurping foreign rulers then, following the tradition of eremitism, a true gentleman refused government office. Instead, he became a mountain recluse, or at least assumed the demeanor of a hermit or rustic fisherman, to protest the corruption of moral order. Vested with meaning as a symbol of ethical reclusion, landscape motifs had poignant significance.

Careful observation of nature did not only translate to depictions of real places. Artists used their knowledge of the natural world to create imagined landscapes as well.

A full appreciation of Chinese art includes embracing the category of “scholar’s rocks,” alternatively called “spirit stones.”  Scholar’s rocks consist of wondrously shaped and textured rocks, often of limestone, that are collected for placement in a designed garden or are brought indoors for display in a scholar’s study. The size can range from twelve feet or more to tiny enough to be enclosed in a fist. Philosophic and religious texts as well as poetry have a long history of singling out mountains and rocks for special consideration. A saying from the time of Confucius (551 BCE–479 BCE) notes, “The wise take joy in water; the humane take joy in mountains.” At the same time, Daoists pictured mountains as sanctuaries or paradises for immortal beings and used minerals in elixirs for infinite life. Placement of evocative rocks in gardens and homes helped turn a mundane space into a paradise, or at least into an environment conducive to cultivating personal longevity or to the pursuit of eternal life.

In Chinese tradition, the educated class delighted in rocks as tangible embodiments of the powers of creation and cosmic transformation, and they sometimes rhapsodized about them as eternally faithful “friends.” Gazing upon them could encourage imaginary travel deep into nature. Chinese scholars, poets, painters, and emperors all engaged in collecting rocks, and painters often studied the rocks they collected, treating them as both muse and model for their landscape paintings.

Journey to India and Indonesia with curator Emma Natalya Stein to explore Hindu and Buddhist temples and their relationships to the local environment:

From intimate courtyards to monumental temple, tomb, and pleasure gardens, Asia has been central to the development of cultivated landscapes. The earliest known garden—the biblical Garden of Eden—may have been located in West Asia at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates in present-day Iraq. The very word “paradise” is derived from the walled orchard gardens and hunting parks of ancient Iran, referred to as pardis. This type of enclosed garden became an integral part of Persian architectural landscape for centuries and also often included pavilions to provide shade and relief from the sun. According to written sources, the earliest gardens in China, dating to the Zhou period (ca. 1050–256 BCE), consisted of enclosed hunting grounds reserved for the royal elite. Chinese gardens were often characterized by carefully positioned rocks and pools intended to recreate microcosms of nature at large. In Japan, gardens followed a more naturalistic design and incorporated rolling hills and languid ponds to underline harmony between humans and their surroundings. In the arid landscapes of West and South Asia, one of the most common garden plans depended on a series of interconnected pools and axial watercourses.

Learn more about the significance of gardens in Chinese art:

Documenting Environmental Changes

Throughout history, art has served as a reflection of and response to environmental change. Sometimes this change is deliberately brought about through human beings adapting to and altering their surrounding environment. Cultural landscapes—including the ways that humans have built on, altered, and imagined natural environments—play a significant role in how we understand the world we inhabit.

Learn more about how the environment influenced painting at the eighteenth-century court of Udaipur in India through an episode of the Smithsonian’s podcast Sidedoor:

Works of art can bear witness to the environmental changes that have taken place throughout recorded history. Depictions of animals from regions where those animals no longer exist, for example, can tell us about migrations or extinctions.

Art also serves as valuable documentation of major environmental events. Read about the Great Kanto Earthquake that rocked Japan, as seen through a series of scenes painted by Japanese artist Nishimura Goun:

Humans have always had an impact on the environments where they live, but the scale of that impact dramatically increased with industrialization. In the United States and Europe, factories and advances in transportation sprung up to create a range of consumer goods and ways to travel with new ease and speed. Largely coal powered, these machines spewed pollution that artists such as Whistler sought to visualize in paint.

Similarly, the infusion of Western technology into Japan from the beginning of the Meiji era (1868–1912) spurred widespread visual documentation of the new developments. Railroad transportation, telegraphic communication, gas-fueled lighting, steam-powered river and ocean vessels, and new materials and designs for bridges and buildings were crammed into the Japanese landscape over two decades.

Contemporary artists are increasingly exploring the impact of climate change on the natural world and human communities, whether their goal is to raise awareness about the urgent need to address climate change, to highlight the social and political issues that are bound up in environmental degradation, or to envision alternative futures and inspire hope and action.

The Creation and Destruction of Art

The creation of art itself impacts and is impacted by the environment. Stones and precious metals need to be mined. Wood needs to be harvested. Clay is extracted from the earth. Plants need to be gathered. Many works of art make use of animal products, such as parchment, feathers, horn, and ivory. Different production techniques require burning fuel sources for melting, firing, and glazing. The gathering of raw materials and their transformation into art objects is not without impact on the environment and has at times come at the expense of the exploitation of natural resources and people.

While recycling may seem like a very recent phenomenon, materials have long been reused in the creation of works of art, whether due to the scarcity of materials or to the value placed on an existing object. For example, since jade was such a prestigious medium and a valuable commodity in ancient China, broken or out-of-fashion articles were not discarded but were instead recycled to make new objects. This appears to be especially true in the late Shang dynasty (ca. 1250–1050 BCE). Archaeologists working at the late Shang capital of Anyang have found that, possibly due to the scarcity of resources at a time of high demand, earlier Stone Age (ca. 5000–1700 BCE) objects were being transformed into decorated jewelry and other items that held more interest and meaning to the Shang people. All three pendants shown here were made by cutting up a special kind of Neolithic square tube called a cong, which had lost its ritual significance by Shang times. It is noteworthy that the recycled cong used here represent different Stone Age cultures dispersed across north and south China.

Environmental conditions can significantly impact the preservation of works of art. Factors such as temperature, humidity, light, and pollution affect the chemical and physical properties of materials in different ways, causing damage and degradation to objects over time. On a larger scale, major environmental changes such as temperature shifts and more destructive weather patterns can threaten heritage sites around the world. Conservators play a pivotal role in safeguarding the objects in the museum’s collections. Read about conservation and scientific research initiatives at the National Museum of Asian Art.

The Smithsonian Institution acknowledges climate change as the existential threat of our time. Learn more about the Smithsonian’s sustainability initiatives.