Teaching East Asia: Korea Teaching East Asia: Korea | Page 179

A Comparative Study of East Asian and American Landscape Paintings
A focus on landscape is a rarity in the history of the arts globally. That it flourished so richly in East Asia owes
much to the Daoist sensibility which permeated both national and religious boundaries, giving rise to a
landscape tradition beginning almost 1,000 years before that of the West.
When it did emerge in Europe in the late Renaissance and Northern Baroque eras, it tended to confirm the
importance of human endeavors, a preoccupation of the times and of the Greco-Roman mindset. Not until the
Romantics of the late 1700’s did Europeans and Americans find the sense of the vast “sublime” in nature
untamed, somewhat comparable to the Daoist intuition. The self-consciousness of both Europeans and
Americans was sharpened by their awareness that the glory of Nature was in some sense imperile