Eco-art-histories: Plants and Paintings in the Arts of Asia
This panel explores eco-art-historical analysis to re-evaluate received knowledge about the place of plant lives in painting in Asia. Moving away from the art historical tradition of reading ‘iconographically’ into plants in paintings, we turn attention to the acknowledgment that art and ecological phenomenon have always been inescapably entangled and sharpen the focus here on the question of the artist’s place in negotiating their plant worlds—trees, bushes, flowers, weeds.
How did plant ecologies inspire artists of Chinese, Indian, or Persian painting? Is it viable as a critical approach to assume that the European herbals were enough for Mughal painters to learn and include species of flowers in their album paintings? Is Chinese landscape painting in dialogue with the ecologies the artists encountered or simply presents formulaic iconographies? Are plants in 14th century Persian paintings mindless, isolated, and merely mechanical imitations of specimens seen in fragments of Song textiles or Yuan scroll paintings? How did painted plants represent the less explored forms of multiplex culturation and different manners of perceiving and receiving the nature and environment?
This panel invites innovative and interdisciplinary approaches, retooling the analytical approach for the study of painting in Asia through the lens of eco-art-history. Such retooling may happen through revisiting the relationship between the medieval/early modern Asian artist and their immediate – or mediated – environment and questioning what constitutes and entails the agency of the artist and their subjective experience of or encounter with nature and its consequential translation into art.
The format will be 20-minute papers followed by a 5-minute Q&A and discussion at the end of the session.
Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:
Professor Sussan Babaie, The Courtauld Institute of Art and University of London, Sussan.babaie@courtauld.ac.uk
Dr. Mahroo Moosavi, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute, Mahroo.moosavi@khi.fi.it