From Wang Wei’s "Deer Camp" to Fan Kuan’s "Travelers Among Streams and Mountains": Poetic Indeterminacy and the Generation of Transcendent Spatial Experience in Landscape Painting

This article reconsiders the relationship between poetry and painting in the Chinese landscape tradition by moving beyond models of thematic correspondence toward a framework of structural transformation. It identifies “poetic indeterminacy” as a foundational condition in classical Chinese poetry, in which experience is organized through perceptual disjunction, imagistic discontinuity, and the deferral of spatial resolution. Focusing on Wang Wei’s Deer Camp (鹿柴) and Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Streams and Mountains (谿山行旅圖), the study demonstrates how this indeterminate structure is not resolved in painting but reconfigured as a mode of spatial generation. Through close reading and formal analysis, it shows that space in landscape painting emerges through occlusion, shifting viewpoints, and partial visibility, producing a visual field that can be entered but not fully grasped. The article proposes a cross-media analytical approach grounded in structural translatability, arguing that the relationship between poetry and painting lies in the transformation of experiential structures rather than in representation. Within this framework, transcendence is redefined as an experiential effect generated in the act of viewing, rather than a pre-existing conceptual content. By foregrounding the role of indeterminacy across media, the study offers a methodological perspective for examining the relationship between poetry and painting beyond strictly representational models.