While European painting for centuries placed the human at the centre, in China the highest genre of art was *shanshui* — "mountain-water" — that is, landscape. At the end of the tenth century, in the Northern Song period, Fan Kuan produced the tradition's most famous work: a hanging scroll on silk nearly two metres tall, "Travelers Among Mountains and Streams."

The composition is built in three registers. Below, rocks and small trees; in the middle, a void divided by mist; above, a vast, sheer mass of rock filling nearly two-thirds of the painting. A thin waterfall drops from the right corner. At the foot of this mountain, noticed only on careful looking, a mule train and two drivers walk — the human is deliberately as small as a mote of dust before the scale of nature. The subject of the painting is not an event or a person but the place of the human within the cosmos.

Fan Kuan's technique too departs from the West. Perspective rests not on a single vanishing point but on a wandering gaze; the viewer roams within the painting, from low to high, near to far. The texture of the rock is given by countless small brush dots called "raindrop" strokes; the emptiness — unpainted silk — is used actively as mist and air. The void carries meaning as much as the fullness.

This scroll became the standard for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese landscape painting for the next thousand years; it is the essence of East Asian aesthetics' relationship with nature. Long thought lost, the signature "Fan Kuan" was noticed in 1958 in a corner of the work, hidden in the shadow of the trees. Today it is held in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, counted among the most precious treasures of Chinese painting.