Writing Out Loss – A Study of Shan (Mountains) and Shui (Water) Part 2 Dissertation 2019 Avery Jiehui Chen Architectural Association London | UK This thesis examines an architectural process that employs the medium of calligraphy as a means to translate landscape into imagery that is imbued with particular meanings and symbolic intentions. This standardisation focused on delineating a single trope that occurs within both Chinese burial practices and Landscape painting – the parting at the foot of a mountain (shan) and a body of water (shui). Although burial spaces within China have changed drastically due to socio-economic pressures in the twentieth century, the two elements of shan and shui have persisted within Landscape painting, frozen within the binds of tradition inherited from the nations dynastic era. The thesis employs the reading of Carlo Ginzburg’s “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method” as a lens to perceive how the standardised production of landscapes allowed traces of authorship to emerge within paintings. More crucially, this repetitive methodology precipitated the expression of personal subject matter; coming about through the painter’s writing out of his or her loss. The thesis argues that this was engendered by the potential for lapses of concentration – running counter to the stifling conventions of the genre – which were realised in the unconscious slippages and failings of painters. Tutor(s) Pier Vittorio Aureli Mark Campbell Maria Shéhérazade Giudici Manolis Stavrakakis