Zhi Garden: Designing a Waterborne Sensorium in the 17th-Century Chinese Garden

This lecture examines Zhi Garden, a now-lost private garden in 17th-century Changzhou, through a close reading of an album of 20 paintings by the late-Ming painter Zhang Hong. Moving beyond more generic interpretations that treat the album as either a site-specific record or an example of naturalistic garden representation, the lecture reconstructs the garden’s hydrological layout, bridge structures, and internal water circuits. Approaching the album from the perspective of the painter as beholder and experiential guide, it argues that the paintings visualize a waterborne itinerary that organizes pictorial sequence and spatial connectivity. Zhang Hong’s sustained attention to boats, shifting viewpoints, and navigable passages suggests that Zhi Garden was conceived as a “garden for boating,” a distinctive and rarely acknowledged typology in Ming garden culture.

Drawing on garden records, contemporary encyclopedic writings on watercraft, and theories of in-motion viewing, the lecture further proposes boating as a perceptual technology and creative device in the water-rich landscape of the Lower Yangzi River Delta (Jiangnan). This mode of movement fostered a kinesthetic and sensory way of seeing that reshaped pictorial narration and spatial imagination. By foregrounding waterborne mobility as both a design principle and a representational strategy, the lecture reframes the relationship between garden design, movement, and pictorial form in late Ming visual culture.

Top image: Zhang Hong, Leaf from Zhi yuan tu,1627, ink and color on paper, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.