Decoding Sharawadgi: Taoist influence on the Chinese landscape garden

This paper explores the influence of Taoist philosophy on Chinese garden aesthetics from crosscultural and interartistic perspectives. Problematising the comparability between the Chinese landscape garden and the European picturesque garden that is based on the notion of irregularity and associated with Sharawadgi, it argues that the Chinese garden is essentially different from its European cousin. It further argues that as the product of an eclectic culture and of a holistic art the Chinese garden has received the strongest influence from Taoism through the agency of landscape poetry and painting. Such influence is seen both in the conception of its space and in the mode of viewing this space.