Slow futures: time and techno-orientalist environmental threat in Yang Yongliang’s Phantom landscape

Climate change knows no borders. This truism reminds us that the waste spewed into the atmosphere in one country, or the garbage dumped in the ocean off the coast of another, does not stay within the air or water space of the nation-state. Yet, paradoxically, the effects of environmental destruction are local and specific: rising sea levels have a different impact on the people of the Marshall Islands than they do on beachfront real estate developers in Florida.

In viewing the evocative imagery of Yang Yongliang’s Phantom landscape, 2010, we might assume its visual language, like its depictions of environmental harm, similarly transcends national boundaries, its meaning equally available to all. However, as viewers we are always positioned in a particular place and bring our own beliefs and biases with us into the museum space. While learning about the cultural context of art can give us glimpses into the original meaning of the work and help us bridge the gap, or at least ameliorate the gulf, between worldviews, it is equally important to recognise how our perceptions emerge from our personal and collective histories.

As the audience for Phantom landscape shifts from China to Australia and other Westernised nations, the weight of cultural narratives about Asian futures pulls us towards prescribed readings of the images. Phantom landscape could easily be subsumed into techno-orientalist narratives that permeate global media representations of Asian technologies.

Techno-orientalism imagines a dystopic, technologically advanced future dominated by Asian cultures. Regarded with both fascination and dread, this vision of the future reflects the fears of Western audiences more than the realities of Asian technological innovation. By recognising these now familiar images and tropes viewers can then move beyond them to grapple with the challenges and paradoxes of the futures invoked by the artwork. Yang himself has commented on the conversations between his work and the Chinese classical tradition of shanshui painting, placing the piece within a different artistic timeline. Far more complex than the grim futures of contemporary science fiction, Phantom landscape raises fundamental questions about the role of time in our ability to understand and respond to our current environmental crisis.

Revising shanshui
Phantom landscape presents a complicated fusion of history and speculative futures, handcraft and technology, and beauty and despair. Yang’s celebrated work is part of a wave of Chinese artwork overtly addressing rapidly growing environmental threats. Like fellow artists such as Yao Lu, Zhan Wang and Lang Jingshan, Yang creates landscapes that reference traditional Chinese art to criticise the degradation of contemporary environments.¹ Kiu-Wai Chu, ‘Ruptured shanshui: landscape composite photography from Lang Jingshan to Yang Yongliang’, Photographies 14, no. 1, 2 Jan. 2021, pp. 3–14; Elena Macrì, ‘Being, becoming, landscape: the iconography of landscape in contemporary Chinese art, its ecological impulse, and its ethical project’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 16, no. 1, Jan–Feb 2017, pp. 32–43; Chang Tan, ‘Landscape without nature: ecological reflections in contemporary Chinese art’, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 3, no. 3, 2016, pp. 223–41. His work seamlessly blends photography with brush painting that, from a distance, looks like classical shanshui or landscape art. What appears to be craggy, mist-shrouded mountains are actually a multitude of composite photographs of skyscrapers, building cranes, electrical towers and other elements typical of industrialised urban landscapes. The buildings/mountains form islands surrounded by misty waterways while interspersed among the buildings and roadways are improbable waterfalls, creating the negative spaces that are closely associated with Chinese landscape paintings.

Scholars have noted Yang’s subversion of shanshui aesthetics to alert the viewer to overdevelopment and environmental harm. In classical shanshui paintings, the ethereal landscapes present an idealised version of nature. These landscapes of mountains and waterways, devoid of human figures, did not attempt to replicate the natural world or give us a realistic vision of nature. Instead, the principals of rhythm and balance informed the aesthetics of the image, and the artwork was an expression of underlying philosophical principals. As critic Chang Tan writes, landscape painting was ‘conceived as the representation and visualization of both the cosmic principal and the ideal social order that manifests it’.² Tan, p. 225. These landscapes functioned as more than beautiful images by giving visible form to the harmony of humans and nature, and, indeed, all things in heaven and on Earth. As part of the literati tradition, shanshui artists eschewed politics to focus on timeless themes of beauty and balance. The images offered a space of contemplation outside of daily life in perfected natural landscapes.

Phantom landscape deliberately recalls these classical shanshui origins, echoing their often-monochromatic palette and the stylised shapes of mountains and water. The use of calligraphy and a red stamp also invoke its literati tradition that celebrated the unity of image and language to create a timeless aesthetic apart from contemporary politics. However, Yang invokes shanshui traditions to question and critique its philosophical origins. In an interview with David Rosenburg, Yang explained:

If I like traditional Chinese art for its depth and inclusiveness, I hate its retrogressive attitude. The ancients expressed their sentiments and appreciation of nature through landscape painting. As for me, I use my own landscape to criticise reality as I perceive it’.³David Rosenberg, ‘The mirror of time’, Paris-B, May 2011, https://www.paris-b.com/artist/yang-yongliang/, accessed 3 Nov. 2024.

Instead of creating a place of refuge, his work asks the viewer to pay attention to the world around us and awaken to the ongoing destruction of the environment.

The trap of techno-orientalism
Stereotypes draw their power from repetition, but they maintain their influence by hiding in plain sight. The dominance of stereotypes means they can masquerade as fact, shaping our worldview as we fail to recognise their ubiquity. Although Yang engages with Chinese art traditions in multilayered and unexpected ways, for many viewers less steeped in the philosophical underpinning of classical Chinese landscape painting, the conjoining of inkbrush painting and contemporary photographs of urbanisation and industrialisation will more readily recall popular science-fictional depictions of dystopic futures. Contemporary popular culture continues to replicate science-fiction media that gestures towards a disturbingly Asian future. Whether these take the form of Asian robots in movies like Ex Machina (2014) or appropriations of Asian decorative styles and clothing in Ghost in the Shell (2017) or the television series The Expanse (2015–22), science-fiction media consistently depicts failed future worlds as worlds infused with Asian signifiers. To do so, they typically draw from historical Asian artistic styles and meld them with images of new technologies. Even if audiences do not explicitly name techno-orientalism as their interpretive frame for the images, the abundance of these tropes as well as their consistent repetition over time have normalised the association of traditional Asian aesthetics and modern technology with science-fiction futures.

Techno-orientalism is a variation on a longer history of orientalist thought in Western cultures. Edward Said, who popularised the term orientalism, wrote an intellectual history of British studies of ‘the Orient’.⁴ Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Vintage, New York, 1979. In that study he argued that what we believe we know about the East shifts and changes over time to reflect the particular needs of the West. We generate knowledge about Eastern cultures to shore up our own self-conception and characterise their culture in opposition to how we view our own cultures. Authors David Morley and Kevin Robins updated the notion of orientalism in the 1990s to account for Western responses to the rising economic power of Japan.⁵ David Morley & Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries, Routledge, London, 1995. They argued stereotypes of Asia were evolving from earlier versions that viewed Asian culture as remnants of a once-great civilisation that had precipitously declined. In that formulation, Asian cultures lagged behind the modern West, trapped by their ancient and barbaric cultures. By contrast, in techno-orientalist narratives Asian cultures had leaped ahead through their technological advances and were ushering in a dark and dystopic future. The cyberpunk fictions popular at the time exemplified these tropes of Asian futurity and, according to Morely and Robins, expressed the fears of waning Western power and an apprehension about the meteoric rise of the Japanese economy, especially in technological products like robots and video games.

The film Blade Runner (1982) gave us the most iconic images of techno-orientalism. In that film, Asian imagery pervades a vision of a futuristic Los Angeles. As Jane Park writes in the book Yellow Future, movies such as Blade Runner and The Matrix take liberally from Asian arts and iconography but Asian people themselves rarely appear as main characters and never as the heroes.⁶ Jane Chi Hyun Park, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010. Instead, they occupy the fringes of society, adding a colourful exoticism to the visual field. In Blade Runner, moving billboards of a geisha cover the sides of entire skyscrapers while workers eat at Asian-style noodle shops in the endless rain down below. Extreme income inequality and a trade in humanoid robots contribute to the neo-noir atmosphere of the film.

Although less overt, other science-fiction media has recalled traditional Asian clothing and used Asian-sounding gibberish for alien languages, as in the Star Wars series and television shows like Firefly. While these films and books, such as William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive, project Asian culture into the future, they primarily address the contemporary concerns of Western audiences looking apprehensively towards the growing global presence of Asian markets. In its melding of futuristic imagery and popular signifiers of Asian-ness, Phantom landscape may invite viewers to an overly simplistic reading of a techno-orientalist future. Wendy Chun, in one of the earlier studies of the stereotype, argues that the specific time periods represented in high-tech orientalism matter.⁷ Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006 The contrast between the past and the future is specially a contrast between Asia at the moment of Western expansion and an imagined Asia of the future. The landscape paintings referenced in Yang’s art was the artwork that captured the imaginations of European and American collectors of the colonial period. Following the first encounters between European travellers and the development of trade routes to Asia in the mid-seventeenth century, a craze for chinoiserie encompassed artwork of all kinds and rapidly dispersed Asian objects throughout popular consumer culture, influencing clothing, interior design and tableware.⁸ Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003. The art imported at the time became a synecdoche of all Asian art, so that viewers would easily identify shanshui painting as Chinese.

To viewers immersed in techno-orientalist narratives, Phantom landscape pairs this specific version of Chinese art with a similarly narrow version of an Asian future, one updated from the early techno-orientalism of the 1980s. With the collapse of the Japanese economy in the early 1990s, techno-orientalist fantasies started to fade, only to be reawakened in the so-called Asian century. Now, however, much of the focus of fascination and fear shifted to China. As David S. Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta A. Niu write in the introduction to their 2015 book Techno-Orientalism, ‘If Japan is a screen on which the West has projected its technological fantasies, then China is a screen on which the West projects its fears of being colonized, mechanized, and instrumentalized in its own pursuit of technological dominance’.⁹David S. Roh, Betsy Huang & Greta A. Niu, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2015, p. 4. In the refiguring of the threat of being eclipsed by Japanese technological advances to a terror of being overrun and dominated by China, techno-orientalist tropes draw from a long history of ‘yellow peril’ fears.

Yellow peril panic in the US came to the fore in the mid 1800s as growing numbers of immigrants, primarily from China, came to the West Coast. Pushed by war and famine and pulled by tales of the gold rush and jobs in the railroad and fishing industry, Chinese workers arrived in the US by the thousands. The backlash was targeted and intense. Chinese workers were lynched and beaten, and their settlements were burned to the ground by white mobs, while multiple laws were passed to limit their immigration and job opportunities. The hostility towards Chinese immigrants was fuelled by stereotypes of Chinese people as invasive insects and as sources of disease.¹⁰ Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, vol. 7, University of California Press, California, 2001. Politicians stirred up fears of Chinese people overwhelming the white population and stealing their jobs due to their supposedly unnatural ability to work long hours for little pay.¹¹ Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1999. We can see echoes of these same sentiments today in science-fiction media representations that exploit fears of an Asian future, a future that promises to undermine the status of white majorities and usher in darkness and disease.

These fears of China are not relegated to centuries past. Techno-orientalist narratives and images have not waned since they first exploded into popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, they have endured and proliferated. As Jane Hu writes in The New Yorker, the 2022 film After Yang ‘falls into this genealogy of techno-orientalism, especially in its focus on Chinese hegemony and Chinese robots’.¹² Jane Hu, ‘Where the future is Asian, and the Asians are robots’, The New Yorker, 2 March 2022, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/where-the-future-is-asian-and-the-asians-are-robots, accessed 14 Nov. 2023. The forthcoming update to the anthology Techno-Orientalism similarly indicates the continuing relevance of these tropes of a troubled Asian future. In the most vivid example, we can see the hostility directed towards China following the Covid-19 pandemic. In the US, the president nicknamed the virus the ‘kung-flu’ and the ‘Chinese virus’, and Asian Americans faced a wave of anti-Asian violence as Chinese people were viewed, once again, as outsiders bringing death and disease.¹³ Jennifer Zheng & Joseph P. Zompetti, ‘“I’m not a virus”: Asian hate in Donald Trump’s rhetoric’, Asian Journal of Communication, vol. 33, no. 5, 2023, pp. 470–503.

Chinese people have also come to be associated with environmental waste and pollution, as Eveline Dürr’s study of attitudes towards Asian migrants in Auckland demonstrates.¹⁴ Eveline Dürr, ‘“Tidy Kiwis/dirty Asians”: cultural pollution and migration in Auckland, New Zealand’, Urban Pollution: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices, 2010, pp. 30–56. Media portrayals of China similarly depict it as a place of environmental degradation. Ironically, many of these portrayals followed China’s decision to stop accepting trash from other parts of the world and acting as its dumping ground. Thus, the way that pollution can spread across permeable national boundaries recalls and reinforces fears of the spread of Asian influence and migration. The threat of the yellow peril has expanded beyond biological pollution to encompass material and toxic waste, too.

Without an understanding of the philosophy shaping shanshui paintings and Yang’s critique of the same, the dread and despair of techno-orientalist futures can overdetermine the viewer’s response. These social scripts lead a viewer to look past the Phantom landscape in front of them, inserting the images into common narratives of nostalgia for a once-great culture and suggesting a reading of the painting as a dystopic rendering of China as a global power.

Alternatively, if we can recognise these stereotypical narratives and their political and social origins, we can then put them aside. This opens up the artwork to more expansive understandings of Yang’s vision of environmental futures and offers the audience a chance to think through complex ideas presented by the environmental and human time scales embedded in Phantom landscape.

Visual time
Moving beyond stereotypical narratives allows the viewer to refocus on one of the most powerful aspects of Phantom landscape – its engagement with the question of time outside of the teleology of techno-orientalism. A sense of time remains one of the elusive and confounding aspects of environmental degradation and often works against our ability to respond to the current ecological crisis. Rob Nixon famously described climate change as a form of slow violence: ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’.¹⁵Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011, p. 2. He argues that we respond to sudden and spectacular disasters instead of the steady accretion of harms and asks how we can ‘engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence’.¹⁶ibid. Phantom landscape provides one answer to Nixon’s query. By asking the viewer to slow down and truly see how we live with environmental harm, Yang opens up a space of understanding and opposition in regard to the current environmental crisis.

Paradoxically, Phantom landscape slows us down by projecting us into the future. Yet, this is not the future we might expect from the science fiction subgenre termed ‘cli-fi’ or climate-change fiction. In cli-fi, big budget and big impact films such as Snowpiercer (2013), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Colony (2013) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) imagine a future planet devastated by climate change in spectacular ways. In these films, a frozen or arid landscape forms a backdrop to the often-violent, fast-paced, action sequences that characterise the genre. The films elicit emotion from the viewer through shock and awe as cameras swoop across the depopulated spaces of the future, overwhelming the viewer with their special effects.

Phantom landscape uses some of these same techniques but to a very different end. Like those films, Phantom landscape give us a futuristic landscape that confronts the viewer with spectacular visuals rendered through technological manipulation of the image. Both beautiful and disturbing, the images capture our attention through an uncanny combination of the familiar and the fantastic. Whereas cli-fi cinema depends on speed and action to reach its audiences, Phantom landscape asks the viewer to slow down, offering greater reward to those who take their time and step out of the frenetic pace of contemporary culture.

Following a credit sequence that begins the short loop of animated images, a mist begins to clear and viewers can observe an almost still picture with a slow and spare musical track. At first glance, the most eye-catching element of the primarily static scene is the waterfall that plunges into the city street, but as the video continues more and more movement comes into focus. Perhaps the moving traffic or the flickering images on the tiny billboards next attract the viewer’s attention. The viewer might also start to recognise the skyscrapers and buildings that make up what, at first glance, appear to be mountains. On closer inspection, the composite pictures give us minute details of individual windows and tiny cars moving through the streets. The more we look, the more we can distinguish the finer points of the image, and the more time we spend with the image the richer our experience.

The floating perspective of the image similarly encourages a slower pace. Rather than orienting towards a single, fixed, perspective that allows the visual information to be absorbed at a glance, visual information is distributed across the entire image. There is too much to take in all at once so that the viewer might move first from one portion of the picture and then to another. In an issue of Mechademia dedicated to what editor Thomas Lamarre calls radical perspectivalism, multiple scholars weigh in on the significance of this kind of non-Cartesian viewing position.¹⁷ Thomas Lamarre, ‘Radical perspectivalism’, Mechademia 7, no. 1, 2012, pp. ix–xviii. As a composite picture, Phantom landscape necessarily includes multiple perspectives. While the camera might provide a single Cartesian perspective, the many photographs deny us that single viewpoint. Jinyin Li argues that anime’s emphasis on lateral movement instead of depth creates a ‘unique way of creating movement within a single static image, which extends the notion of superflat visuality from spatial orientation to temporal organization’ (emphasis original).¹⁸ Jinying Li, ‘From superflat Windows to Facebook walls: mobility and multiplicity of an animated shopping gaze’, Mechademia 7, no. 1, 2012, p. 207. Li goes on to cite artist Takashi Murakami who promotes anime aesthetics for the way it ‘controls the speed of its observers gaze’.¹⁹ ibid. p. 208. While Murakami’s bright pop art diverges widely from the monochromatic intricacies of Phantom landscape, its density of detail encourages the eye to move slowly across the surface.

The use of sound similarly distinguishes Phantom landscape from the bombast of much of cli-fi cinema. The loop begins with a spare instrumental piece full of long, drawn out notes. After about a minute, the music mixes with the sound of traffic, honking horns and mechanical equipment. The industrial sounds grow louder and denser, and the music fades away. At the very end of the loop, a plane crosses the image and the sound of its engine drowns out all other sound until it passes by. Like the contrast between the classical landscape painting and the photographs of buildings and traffic, the music at the beginning of the loop works as a point of comparison to the noises that follow. Rather than a simple opposition, each element works relationally, we pay attention to the traffic sounds because we are first introduced to the image with music. It enables us to recognise the sounds that surround those who live in urban environments. Usually, the near constant sound of cars and construction eventually fade from our consciousness, becoming nothing more than a background hum of white noise. However, the slow transition from music to an urban soundscape renews our attention to these everyday sounds.

While the images slow us down and the sound asks us to pay attention, the action of the film loop attunes us to the slow violence of environmental harm. By eschewing drama in favour of the everyday, Phantom landscape recreates the common experience of an environment under attack. Even terming the movement of the film as action or event overstates its activity. Films depicting our grim environmental future usually feature snowstorms, floods or other appropriately cinematic climatic events. Here the changes to the environment are incorporated into the fabric of the city and pass without any apparent change to the daily business of the metropolis. The two large waterfalls form key moving elements of the image, but they do not result in a massive deluge of the city streets. Instead, they flow serenely, and improbably, over the buildings and shower down to street level disappearing out of sight or dispersing into mist. The ending of the loop is punctuated by a huge jet flying across the landscape, providing the only large movement in the entire sequence. The mundane experience of being stuck in traffic and seeing international tankers glide through the waters usually passes by unremarked even as they contribute to climate change. Travelling by airplane is one of the most environmentally damaging activities undertaken by an individual, yet we watch planes fly across our skies nearly constantly without concern.²⁰ Jocelyn Timperley, ‘Should we give up flying for the sake of the climate?’, BBC, 18 Feb. 2020, http://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-how-to-cut-your-carbon-emissions-when-flying, accessed 14 Nov. 2024; Hiroko Tabuchi, ‘“Worse than anyone expected”: air travel emissions vastly outpace predictions’, The New York Times, 19 Sep 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/climate/air-travel-emissions.html, accessed 14 Nov. 2024. Rather than confront us with shocking scenes of the destruction caused by environmental degradation, Phantom landscape leads us to contemplate the damage to the environment we experience daily.

Melancholy futures
The barrage of apocalyptic narratives of environmental destruction arouses feelings of anxiety and dread for our future. Environmental studies scholars have named the phenomenon ‘climate anxiety’ and have observed the tendency of those feeling climate anxiety to disengage, responding to environmental threats with paralysing anxiety or apathy.²¹Anne Gammelgaard Ballantyne, ‘Climate change communication: what can we learn from communication theory?’, WIREs Climate Change 7, no. 3, May 2016, pp. 329–44. The powerful narratives of popular cli-fi cinema and the long-standing tropes of techno-orientalism amplify fears of future threats. Techno-orientalist stereotypes, in particular, tie dystopic futures to a growing Asian cultural influence and expanding political and economic power. Stereotypes gain their power, in part, by escaping notice. The repetition of familiar representations normalises them and renders them invisible even as they shape our perception of others. By recognising their historical roots and social impacts, however, viewers can begin to dismantle their hold over our worldviews. Instead of submitting to the pull of techno-orientalist tropes that might overwrite the images in front of us, the viewer can find other ways to respond, instead, to the alternative spaces and timelines of Phantom landscape.

The quotidian environmental harms depicted in Phantom landscape rarely grab our attention as we go about our daily routines. This work of art affords the viewer time to experience the world around us and the worlds yet to come. Even for the viewer unaware of the philosophical underpinnings of shanshui paintings and Chinese literati traditions, Yang creates a space apart from the relentless pace of urban life. Although the images deviate notably from the timeless landscapes of shanshui paintings, they still invoke those contemplative traditions. The film activates melancholy and nostalgia instead of shock and fear. If those visceral emotions might cause us to respond with avoidance, then the more subdued effects encouraged by the visual, aural and (non) narrative elements of Phantom landscape encourage a turning towards environmental thinking. With this work of art we are given a moment to stop, to breathe, to mourn, and to contemplate an uncertain future.

LeiLani Nishime is an Associate Professor of Communication and an Adjunct Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.

Notes