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Mind-blowing Moment
in childhood

The start of Gary Snyder’s
journey on exploring Chinese
landscape is from a life-changing
moment when he was visiting the
Seattle Art Museum at the age of
10. This rst-time exposure to
the exotic eastern landscape
painting totally blew his little
mind away.

Growing up in the Cascades of
Washington and the Olympics
ranges that are “wet, rugged,
densely forested mountains that
are hidden in cloud and mist
much of the year”, little Gary
found the misty Chinese
mountains in Chinese painting are
“real”.
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" I saw rst that they looked like real

mountains, and mountains of an order Gary Snyder at the age of 17
close to my heart; second that they
were different mountains of another This sophisticated perspective of mountains
place and true to those mountains as in Chinese landscape painting is undoubtedly
well; and third that they were developed at a later stage after multi-years of
mountains of spirit and that these study, yet their origins may be traced to that
paintings pierced into another reality insightful moment at Gary’s early age.
which both was and was not the same
reality as 'the mountains.' "
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