Chapter 1: Desolate Landscape and Emotional Scenery
1.1 What “Desolate” Really Means
People usually think “desolate” means empty or abandoned. But in my paintings, it means something different—it’s about being fully present with yourself. The emptiness in my landscapes doesn’t show what’s missing. Instead, it invites viewers to come back to themselves and feel the connection between their body and the space around them.
Zeqi Tang. (2025) Portrait of a Moonlit Night II.Oil on canvas. 40x30cm. Artist’s collection.
This connects to what philosophers call “felt space” and “atmosphere.” As Merleau-Ponty writes, “the body is our general medium for having a world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 146). In the smallest, quietest spaces, we can reach what Bachelard calls an “intimate immensity” (Bachelard, 1994: 183-185).
Trigg describes atmosphere as an emotional field that forms between us and the world (Trigg, 2020: 15-28). In my paintings, I create this atmosphere through low horizons, quiet colors, and large empty spaces. The emptiness gains emotional weight—it becomes filled with absence. This “presence in desolation” continues the Romantic tradition of landscapes as mirrors of the soul, while also connecting to the Chinese literati ideal of cultivating the spirit through emptiness and stillness.
1.2 A Finnish Winter Night: Memory Out of Place
My understanding of “desolation landscape” grew from a winter trip to Finland, searching for the Northern Lights. The frozen air, the soft sound of boots on snow, and the dark forest created a calm, stable feeling. Waiting in a Sami wooden hut or walking on a frozen lake, I unexpectedly felt safe and peaceful. This feeling—made of cold, silence, and thin light—reminded me of childhood winters in China. The snow was familiar, but the tension I once connected with home was gone.
This displacement between place and memory—being both like home and not home—shows what Trigg calls the “uncanny,” the feeling of strangeness within the familiar (Trigg, 2012: 101-132). The northern cold and silence became containers for emotion, letting me relocate feelings that couldn’t be resolved in their original setting. That’s why in my paintings, emptiness is never hollow—it’s an emotional space that has been witnessed.
1.3 From the Sublime to Emotional Landscapes
Friedrich’s Dual Legacy: Facing and Transcending
Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) serves as a visual prototype for my “desolate landscapes.” The Rückenfigur—the lone figure seen from behind—stands before a sea of mist. This is not only a vision of Romantic sublimity but also an existential moment of confronting infinity. As Koerner observes, the figure creates a double structure of vision: we both look at him and through him (Koerner, 2009: 210–219). This mediated gaze turns solitude into a shared experience.
Even more influential for me is Friedrich’s Tetschen Altar (1808), which uses only fir trees and a mountain cross to evoke a sacred atmosphere. Without narrative or human presence, it expresses spirituality purely through the composition of natural elements. This strategy of absence as presence inspired me to let landscape itself embody emotion—the posture of trees, the path of light, and the gaps of space all become ways to evoke inner resonance.
Lonely Pines and Longing: From Canada to China
Tom Thomson’s The Jack Pine (1917) brings this emotional landscape into another register. The solitary pine on a northern lake shore, its twisted branches shaped by the wind, feels like an outward trace of emotion. It reminds me of the willow in Chinese art and poetry—homophonous with liú (to stay), symbolising parting and affection.Within Chinese culture, natural motifs carry emotional codes: the plum for integrity, the bamboo for resilience, the willow for attachment.
The moon holds a special place in this symbolic system. It’s both the collective emotional anchor in “gazing at the bright moon together, we should shed tears,” and the companion to solitude in “raising my cup, I invite the bright moon; with my shadow we become three.” Southern Song painter Ma Yuan’s moon-viewing paintings show another kind of solitude in the literati ideal: not passive isolation, but actively chosen spiritual self-sufficiency. This “nobility” isn’t moral superiority, but the ability to create meaning while acknowledging solitude.
Moral Ideals and Spiritual Landscapes
Here we see a fundamental difference between Western and Chinese painting. While Western art often aims to represent reality, the literati tradition seeks to express moral or spiritual ideals. Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains isn’t really about geography—it embodies the ability to stay calm during chaos
My “desolate landscapes” work between these two traditions: the Romantic sublime of confronting infinity, and the literati expression of cultivated stillness. When I paint moonlit nights or empty snowfields, I’m not recording a place but building a spiritual space—where solitude becomes fullness and silence becomes another way of speaking.
Chapter 2: Poetry and Cross-Media Methods
2.1 Poetry as a Reason for Living
Poetry and the Meaning of Life
In Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating shares words that deeply moved me: “Medicine, law, business, engineering—these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for” (Weir, 1989).
This captures exactly how I understand artistic creation. Poetry goes beyond being a tool for survival—it becomes what gives survival meaning. In my practice, the poetic isn’t decorative rhetoric but a way of being—a way that makes the world bearable and worth experiencing.
Historical Context of Cross-Media Translation
The combination of poetry and music in my art isn’t accidental—it continues a deep historical tradition. As Roger Fry points out in Vision and Design, we must trace modern abstract art back to Romantic aesthetic theory (Fry, 1920). The Romantics first systematically proposed that all art forms—music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture—essentially share the same aesthetic experience.
Music holds a special position because it has a unique quality: it can directly convey emotion without needing representation, narrative, or any external reference. This recognition sparked a visual arts revolution in the late 19th century. The Symbolists, particularly Whistler in his Nocturnes series, declared visual art’s pursuit of music-like purity by naming paintings with musical terms (Whistler, 1890).
Contemporary Reinterpretation
My creative work builds on this tradition but reinterprets it for today. What I practice is what I call “cross-media transference.” At its core, this means that emotional states awakened by music or poetry are transformed into a new visual language through embodied painting.
Unlike traditional media conversion, cross-media transference emphasizes not formal matching (like turning high notes into bright colors) but reconstructing emotional logic. Deleuze’s “logic of sensation” takes on new meaning here: different media can touch the same sensory core, but each reveals this sensation through its unique materiality and temporality (Deleuze, 2003).
2.2 Body, Memory, and Gesture
Brushstrokes aren’t just traces of paint on canvas—they’re records of bodily movement. Merleau-Ponty writes: “It is by lending his body to the world that the painter transforms the world into painting.” When I make different marks, different parts of my body move—short, quick strokes come from rapid wrist movements, while flowing long lines need the sweep of my entire arm.
These brushstrokes carry what I call “disciplinary body memory.” Drawing training from childhood has left deep marks in my body: lines should be light at both ends and heavy in the middle; hatching should be orderly yet varied. These rules have gone beyond consciousness, becoming natural hand movements. This body memory resonates with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, but I prefer to emphasize its creative potential.
2.3 Two Series in Dialogue
The Field That Breathes: Musicalized Emotional Fragments
The seventeen 10×10 cm paintings in The Field That Breathes series are the core testing ground for my cross-media transference method. Each work corresponds to a specific musical moment, but this correspondence isn’t descriptive—it’s the result of emotional resonance.
The creative process begins with what I call “active listening.” When music plays, I let my body respond first—breathing changes with rhythm, muscles tense or relax with melody. This bodily state then transforms into painting through hand movements. Both Kandinsky and Klee explored “visual music,” but my method emphasizes more the body’s role as mediator (Kandinsky, 1977; Klee, 1961).
That Good Night: Poetic Settling and Rising
If The Field That Breathes captures emotions spontaneously, then That Good Night is emotion’s settling and sublimation. This 160×130 cm large work contrasts not just in scale but reaches new dimensions in creative method and emotional depth.
The work draws inspiration from Dylan Thomas’s line “Do not go gentle into that good night,” but my interpretation transforms the poem’s fierce struggle into gentle persistence (Thomas, 1952). Thomas writes: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”—this “rage” in my painting becomes internalized as a quiet but firm way of existing.
The painting shows grassland under moonlight, wind sweeping across water, everything about to disappear yet still persisting. This isn’t illustrating the poem but visually reconstructing its emotional core. Moonlight isn’t just a light source but a metaphor for time—gentle, brief, yet cyclical.
Chapter 3: The Moon as Emotional Container
3.1 Palmer’s Poetic Night
Samuel Palmer’s Evening (1834) presents a pastoral scene full of poetry: a crescent moon hangs in the twilight sky, exaggerated tree curves form the composition’s skeleton, and sheep cluster into warm white masses. Palmer’s moon isn’t a cold celestial body, but a “presence” given emotional warmth. Its light is gentle yet steady, creating an intimate, almost touchable atmosphere.
Palmer’s obsession with moonlit nights comes from memory. For him, moonlight was an entrance to inner memory, carrying the “lost Eden”—that pre-industrial world where humans and nature hadn’t yet become strangers. This memory dimension resonates deeply when I view his work: Palmer’s moon overlaps with my memory of that Finnish snow night—both are materializations of “distant intimacy,” both provide emotional anchors that let us find belonging in unfamiliar spaces.
3.2 Contemporary Solitude in a Changing World
Contemporary East Asia has undergone rapid transformation—from traditional societies to hyper-modern economies within just a few generations. This speed of change has created a particular emotional landscape where different generations carry vastly different worldviews and ways of expressing care.
The older generations, shaped by historical upheavals and scarcity, often developed survival strategies centered on practical rationality and emotional restraint. This wasn’t coldness, but adaptation—in uncertain times, emotional vulnerability could be dangerous. These patterns of reserved expression became embedded in cultural norms, where care is often shown through actions rather than words, through provision rather than verbal affirmation.
Meanwhile, younger generations navigate a different world—one that demands both high performance and emotional intelligence, both independence and connection. We find ourselves caught between competing values: the traditional emphasis on resilience and self-reliance, and the contemporary desire for emotional authenticity and open communication. This creates a particular tension in how we form relationships—wanting deep connection while maintaining protective boundaries, seeking intimacy yet needing “safe distance.”
3.3 The Moon: “Distant Intimacy”
Within this contemporary emotional predicament, the moon as artistic motif gains new interpretive power. The moon’s symbolic meaning is inherently contradictory: it’s the brightest presence yet offers no warmth, appears close yet remains unreachable, follows constant cycles yet its phases constantly change. These contradictory qualities perfectly metaphorize the state of intimate relationships that contemporary people both desire and fear.
In Portrait of a Moonlit Night and That Good Night, the moon becomes the visualization of this contradictory relationship. The moon is both a light source illuminating the ground and an untouchable object, forever suspended on the other shore. Its existence creates a special spatial relationship—we’re illuminated by it, we feel its influence, yet we cannot possess or change it.
The moon’s un-possessability dissolves possessiveness—we cannot “have” the moon, therefore we won’t suffer from “losing” it. It’s always there, existing in its own way, not drawing closer because of our longing, not receding because of our indifference. This stable “presence” offers particular comfort.
In Chinese poetic tradition, the moon has long carried complex emotional functions. From Li Bai’s “raising my cup, I invite the bright moon, with my shadow we become three” to Zhang Jiuling’s “over the sea grows the bright moon, we gaze together though worlds apart,” the moon is both companion to solitude and medium connecting distant places. It witnesses joy and sorrow, never intervening or judging, only silently illuminating. This “silent witnessing” is precisely what contemporary people lack—not advice or solutions, but simply “being there,” allowing emotions to exist and flow.
3.4 From Palmer to the Contemporary
Connecting Palmer’s Romanticism with my contemporary practice is an emotional dialogue across time and space. Palmer used moonlit nights at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to express longing for pastoral ideals; I use similar imagery in the digital age to respond to modern solitude. Both use art to resist “loss”—Palmer lost the poetic nature of the pre-industrial era, I have lost the emotional connection broken in generational transmission.
Yet the dialogue also reveals differences. Palmer’s moonlit nights are utopian, attempting to rebuild an idealized, harmonious world. My moonlit nights are more ambiguous and unresolved—landscapes under moonlight are beautiful but empty; the moon offers companionship but remains unreachable. This reflects the paradigm shift from Romanticism to contemporary art: we no longer believe art can provide complete redemption, but see it as a way to open dialogue, contain contradictions, and create emotional space.
Conclusion: Poetic Response as Survival Strategy
The moon as “emotional container” holds both individual feelings and collective experiences; it offers comfort and companionship while maintaining necessary distance and unresolvedness. Its power lies not in solving problems, but in creating poetic space where we can temporarily escape the pressures of modern life and reconnect with our inner selves.
In that space, solitude isn’t a pathology to be eliminated but a fundamental dimension of the human condition; intimacy isn’t complete fusion but connection while maintaining subjectivity; companionship isn’t continuous possession but stable “presence.”
As Dead Poets Society reminds us: “Medicine, law, business, engineering—these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for.” In an increasingly instrumentalized world, artistic creation becomes a survival strategy. It’s not escape from reality, but creating breathing space within reality’s cracks; not denying rationality’s necessity, but insisting that rationality shouldn’t be the only mode of existence.
Through continuously depicting moonlit nights, I construct a “poetics of presence”—acknowledging solitude and incompleteness, yet not abandoning the pursuit of beauty and meaning. The moon is always there, not drawing closer because of longing, not receding because of neglect. It illuminates the night at its own rhythm, reminding us: some things are worth looking up to, even if we can never touch them.
References
Alexander, J. C. (2004) ‘Toward a theory of cultural trauma’, in Alexander, J. C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N. J. and Sztompka, P. (eds.) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-30.
Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Deleuze, G. (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by D.W. Smith. London: Continuum.
Fry, R. (1920) Vision and Design. London: Chatto & Windus.
Kandinsky, W. (1977) Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated by M.T.H. Sadler. New York: Dover Publications.
Klee, P. (1961) The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee. Edited by J. Spiller. London: Lund Humphries.
Koerner, J. L. (2009) Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape. London: Reaktion Books.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) ‘Eye and Mind’, in Edie, J.M. (ed.) The Primacy of Perception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159-190.
Thomas, D. (1952) ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, in In Country Sleep and Other Poems. New York: New Directions.
Trigg, D. (2012) The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Trigg, D. (2020) Atmospheric Fears and Feelings. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Weir, P. (dir.) (1989) Dead Poets Society [Film]. Burbank: Touchstone Pictures.
Whistler, J.M. (1890) The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. London: William Heinemann.
Images
Friedrich, C. D. (1808) The Cross in the Mountains (Tetschen Altar) [Oil on canvas]. Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden.
Friedrich, C. D. (1818) Wanderer above the Sea of Fog [Oil on canvas]. Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg.
Ma Yuan (c. 1200) Appreciating Plum Blossoms under the Moon [Ink and color on silk]. Collection unknown.
Ma Yuan (c. 1200) Enjoying the Moon in a Pine Grove [Ink and color on silk]. Collection unknown.
Palmer, S. (1834) Evening [Engraving]. Tate Britain, London.
Zeqi Tang. (2025) Portrait of a Moonlit Night I [Oil on wood]. 30×20cm. Artist’s collection.
Zeqi Tang. (2025) Portrait of a Moonlit Night II [Oil on canvas]. 40×30cm. Artist’s collection.
Zeqi Tang. (2025) That Good Night [Oil on canvas]. 160×130 cm. Artist’s collection.
Zeqi Tang. (2025) The Field That Breathes Series [Oil on wood]. 10×10 cm each. Artist’s collection.
Zeqi Tang. (2025) Winter Landscape in Romiguières [Photograph]. Rovaniemi, Finland.
Thomson, T. (1917) The Jack Pine [Oil on canvas]. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Whistler, J. M. (1872) Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge [Oil on canvas]. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=127417 (Accessed: 9 June 2022).
About the author
Zeqi Tang is an artist currently based in London. She works across painting and cross-media practice, exploring emotional landscapes through the interplay of emptiness, moonlight, and poetic space. Zeqi completed the MA Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Arts (UAL) in 2025, after a BA in Printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing. Follow her work at @zeqi_tang and zeqitang.com.