This essay reads Shitao’s Huayu lu (Treatise on Painting) to clarify the Chinese theory of the image and of landscape (shanshui). For Shitao, the inner nature of landscape is grasped by understanding the structure of the universe, while brush and ink realize its external aspect; true painting goes beyond surface appearance, so that “the landscape is generated by me, just as I am generated by the landscape”. Shitao’s formula “mountain as sea, sea as mountain” expresses the correlation of polar opposites, which the author connects with Daoist and Chan thought and with François Jullien’s reading of shanshui and fengjing (“wind-light”) as pairs that hold the world in tension. Painting and viewing thus become ethical practices: rather than fixing an object, the painter leaves traces and empty spaces that the onlooker completes, allowing qi to circulate through the image. Since East Asian thought lacks the notion of an original divine creation, artistic creation is understood as transformation (bianhua, zaohua), ideally performed without an imposing subject, as expressed by no-ego, no-mind and wuwei. The author concludes that Chinese landscape painting proposes an aesthetics of passage, in which the artist’s intention (yi) attunes itself to the impersonal flow of nature.