Strange Realms in Late Ming Landscape: The Visual Production of Daoist Space in Wu Bin’s 吳彬 Fanghu Tu 方壺圖

In late Ming China, landscape (shanshui 山水) painting could function not only as a scenic representation but also as a pictorial means of making sacred space perceptible. This article examines Wu Bin’s hanging scroll Fanghu Tu 方壺圖 (1626; Palace Museum, Beijing) and asks how the painting renders Daoist sacred space visible through relations of distance, access, concealment, and uneven disclosure. To avoid treating “Daoist aesthetics” as a general label, the analysis uses schema and pictorial organization as limited descriptive terms for the structuring of spatial experience within the image. The close reading identifies two recurrent pictorial formations brought into relation in Fanghu Tu: a sea-boundary, distant-view configuration that emphasizes separation and delay, and a pavilion-centered enclosure that produces a more concentrated middle field. It then shows how layered waves and broken shoreline, cloud and mist, middle-zone enclosure, and the thinning legibility of the upper peaks prevent the scene from stabilizing into a single resolved destination. Read in relation to late Ming discussions of cultivated “strangeness” (qi 奇) in landscape painting, these features suggest that Daoist sacred space in Fanghu Tu takes shape as an uneven and mediated experience, structured through provisional concentration, interrupted visibility, and renewed distance. The article argues that late Ming landscape painting could render Daoist-inflected sacred spatial experience visible not only through iconography, but also through the pictorial distribution of visibility, access, and reorientation.