The Chinese words for landscape, shan shui, mean mountain water, and these two elements are in constant interplay in the Chinese mountain landscape. Huangshan, the Yellow Mountains, a national park and UNESCO site, is where the traditional landscape painters found their inspiration. The peaks of Zhangjiajie, also a national park and UNESCO site, are famous in China for their association with the film Avatar.  The karst formations of the Li Valley and the ancient Longsheng rice terraces are intimately associated with the culture and agriculture of their inhabitants. None of these mountains are “wild” in the sense of North American wilderness, yet they hold a special place in the culture of China.  These images come from my study of traditional Chinese landscape painting and my experiments in transposing their way of seeing to the medium of contemporary digital photography.