This article reviews the China Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), curated by Zhang Zikang, director of the CAFA Art Museum, under the title Meta-Scape (Yuanjing 元境). Responding to the questions posed by Cecilia Alemani for the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, about the changing definition of the human and our responsibilities towards other life forms and the planet, the pavilion focused on the natural environment, the relationship between individuals and technology, and the links between bodies and the Earth. Its works included Wang Yuyang’s Snowman and A Fourth (Jie Qi), Jungle by the AT Group, Xu Lei’s Correspondances and Liu Jiayu’s Streaming Stillness. The author argues that, rather than escaping into surreal other worlds, the Chinese artists chose to “cross” and reinterpret the existing world through poetry and metaphor, using new technologies not to replace traditional practices such as shanshui painting but to offer new keys to them. Liu Jiayu’s immersive digital mountains, based on Song painting and the ancient geography of the Yu Gong, and Xu Lei’s layered transparencies of trees from Song, ukiyo-e and Renaissance painting are analysed as cross-cultural, time-conscious reinterpretations of jing, the landscape as a realm of spiritual perception.