‘Landscape’ was not devalued by the socialist realist oil painting of post-1949 China, but moved sideways as a subject and back into the picture plane as the framing site for heroic acts or transformative moments in the development of a socialist future. With the rise of the New Currents in Art movement of the 1980s, landscape was re-imagined as a site for a surrealist dreaming, whether counter-establishment or nationalist in intent. This 1980s and 1990s landscape painting, largely in oils, has survived both academic neglect and inattention from ostensibly more contemporary discourses, to obtain some recognition as a representation of the Chinese ‘folk’ or ‘national’ spirit. Landscape oil painting, despite sometimes being expressionistically naïve or technically less impressive than its painters might suppose, may respond to a need in its audience and a discursive demand for a modern cross-over between post-1949 and earlier imaginary landscapes in Chinese painting. The paper will be a tentative move towards a survey of the horizon of these issues chiefly by reference to the paintings and writings of Ding Fang (b.1956), and some notions from Warnke’s Political landscape, 1992.