This article pairs two short essays, each titled “Mountain + Water,” on the black-ink landscapes of the artist Gwen Van Embden, whose practice draws directly on the Chinese tradition of shanshui painting. Writing on the title’s opposition of mountain (the immutable) and water (the fluid), Mary Corrigall reads the works as both retreat and recognition, a distillation of remembered horizons rendered in black ink on raw Belgian linen and shaped by an intuitive engagement with the medium and with South Africa’s political history. Prof. Dr. Pippa Skotnes situates the paintings within a politics of landscape at once escape and externalisation, placing their ink-wash tonalities in dialogue with Rembrandt’s mezzotint, Goya’s Disasters of War, Turner, and the gold-leaf grounds of Sienese altarpieces. The authors argue that these works, made in black ink on canvas and silk and formatted after rotated Chinese screens, speak across Chinese, European, and African traditions of landscape, offering a space where personal experience and collective tradition meet in a record of what is both fleeting and eternal.