The Unpicturesque; or, Wen Yiduo in Chicago

Abstract The art critic John Ruskin once used the term unpicturesque to describe a prevailing sentiment among European painters in the nineteenth century: forests in the Swiss Alps were considered too dense to be painted. Whereas the unpicturesque in Ruskin’s time signified the perceived unsuitability of a subject matter for artistic representation, this essay redeploys the term to identify a radical development in modern poetics. It explains how the Chinese poet Wen Yiduo synthesized painting and poetry, as well as Chinese and Western aesthetic traditions, to experiment with the depiction of unbeautiful nature. As an art student in Chicago in the 1920s, Wen drew on his experiences of the city’s green spaces and industrial pollution to formulate the unpicturesque as a new aesthetic ideal. By overturning genre and aesthetic expectations, the unpicturesque compels readers to rethink the nature of perception and aesthetic judgment. Unraveling the facile opposition between poetry and science, Wen’s unpicturesque also demonstrates the power of poetry to shed light on ecological degradation in both figurative and material terms. In the final analysis, the essay shows how Wen’s biological poetics, or biopoesis, depicts at a literary level the emergence of organic life from inorganic matter as theorized in evolutionary science.