This article compares the representation of the four seasons in Western art with its treatment in Chinese landscape painting, focusing on Wu Dakai’s polyptych Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. The author shows that Western art, from the medieval cycles of the months at Ferrara and Parma to Arcimboldo, Rosalba Carriera, Cézanne, Mucha and Hugh Ramsay, has persistently personified the seasons, usually as female figures, using allegory to make the intangible flow of time humanly comprehensible. Even Impressionists and Van Gogh, who treated nature as an autonomous subject, retained an observational or subjective stance. Drawing on Shitao, François Jullien, François Cheng and Gadamer, the article argues that Western painting seeks an ontological “increase of being” in the depicted object, whereas Chinese painting conveys the continuous flow of qi and the Dao without compartmentalising time. Wu Dakai’s four panels depict the same mountain in four conditions, each dominated by a seasonal colour: green, blue, red and white. Human presence is minimal, and nature remains the sole subject. The author concludes that Wu Dakai expresses not a subjective essence but the “void” of the painter’s non-self and the impermanence of nature.