This article compares the graphic sign in Vincent van Gogh’s ink sketches, especially those drawn in his letters to his brother Theo, with the expressive line in the mountain and water paintings of Ma Lin and Guo Xi. The author argues that in Chinese painting, shaped by Daoist and Confucian thought, line has long served to capture the vital energy (qi) and inner life of nature, whereas in the West the idea of landscape as a “living being” emerged only with Romanticism. Van Gogh, who understood his own work in a religious key, sought through dense, broken and discontinuous strokes to express the essence of nature rather than its appearance, drawing on Impressionism, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Japanese ukiyo-e prints he collected and copied. These prints, the author notes, were themselves indebted to the Ma-Xia tradition admired in Japan. Analysing Ma Lin’s Spring Fragrance, Clearing After Rain and Guo Xi’s Early Spring, the article highlights shared features such as free, slashing brushwork and the expressive use of emptiness. It also identifies a crucial difference: Van Gogh’s close-up, fragmentary views convey tension and even fear before nature, rather than the sense of communion and immersion found in shanshui painting.