Die Rückkehr des stillen Reisenden

Haywood, Mark
Mark Haywood has both a PhD from the Royal College of Art and a studio-based MFA. After a long international career as an artist, art historian, researcher and professor, he now lives in SW France and, writes on aspects of visual culture. His main concerns are the creation of aesthetic values pertaining to landscape, the body and modernist design.

This Return of the Silent Traveller was an international art project conceived and managed by the author. Set in the English Lake District, it marked the 70th anniversary of a visit there by Chinese painter/poet, Chiang Yee. His illustrated journal was published as The Silent Traveller in Lakeland, since running to many editions. This popularity is due to how, through words and paintings the author re-presented famous English landscapes in a fresh, unfamiliar way. With this in mind, in 2005, Weng Fen a rising star of the contemporary Chinese art scene was given an open invitation to make a new body of work in the Lake District. Chiang Yee's work was a traditional Daoist approach to landscape, whilst Weng Fen's large scale photographs were informed by cinema and otherness. The book historically contextualises and aesthetically analyses two very different physical and intellectual responses to these famous landscapes. In 2017 the region became a World Heritage site due to its historical contribution to Western landscape aesthetics (the picturesque and Romanticism). Haywood uses critical theory to locate their technical and conceptual relationship to the work of the Chinese artists.