Chenru Xue
chenru.c.xue [a] utu.fi
Doctoral Researcher
Department of Landscape Studies, University of Turku
How to cite: Xue, Chenru. 2025. ”Lectio Praecursoria: The Dynamics of Space, Place and Landscape: Understanding the Arctic Landscape from a Lacanian Perspective”. WiderScreen Ajankohtaista. https://widerscreen.fi/numerot/ajankohtaista/lectio-praecursoria-the-dynamics-of-space-place-and-landscape-understanding-the-arctic-landscape-from-a-lacanian-perspective/
This lectio praecursoria was delivered at the public defense of Chenru Xue’s doctoral dissertation The Dynamics of Space, Place and Landscape: Understanding the Arctic Landscape from a Lacanian Perspective at the Department of Landscape Studies, University of Turku, on October 31, 2025.
Biography
Chenru Xue is a PhD researcher in Landscape Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Her interdisciplinary academic background spans visual culture, digital media arts and landscape studies, and her research focuses on how landscapes are shaped and understood through visual representation, discourse, and embodied experience.
Her doctoral dissertation, The Dynamics of Space, Place and Landscape: Understanding the Arctic Landscape from a Lacanian Perspective, explores how Arctic landscapes are constructed and contested across various media. Informed by psychoanalytic theory and critical geography, she explores the tensions between representational and non-representational understandings of landscape, emphasizing the importance of absence, loss, and the unspeakable in shaping spatial meaning. Her interdisciplinary approach is attentive to both the semiotic structures of imagery and the lived, sensory encounters that often escape formal representation. Through the triadic lens of the Lacanian Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, she examines how ideologies, subjectivities, and power structures converge to shape the meaning and experience of Arctic spaces.
Chenru has published peer-reviewed articles in Tahiti, WiderScreen, and edited volumes by Edward Elgar Publishing. Outside academia, she brings extensive experience in digital media production. Her creative work has also been recognized internationally, with her short film Empery of Frigidity screened at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated in four categories at the Milan International Film Festival.
Lectio Praecursoria
Learned Custos, my esteemed Opponent, honourable members of the audience, welcome to my doctoral defence.
Earlier this week, as I was reflecting on the original motivation behind my research, I tried to put in the keyword “Arctic Landscape” into three of today’s most popular search engines.
This is what Google showed me.
This is what appeared on Bing.
And these are the results from Yahoo.
These images share almost identical tones, compositions, and visual elements. The Arctic landscape seems consistently bound to the imagery of a romantic and distant wilderness. Most strikingly, none of these images contain any people’s trace.
This absence unsettles me, because the Arctic is also a region shaped by geopolitical tensions, climate crisis, and the struggles of Indigenous communities for cultural recognition. These picturesque images have little resemblance to the complex and living realities of the region.
These nearly homogenized images of the Arctic landscape were the starting point of my doctoral research. I wanted to understand how the Arctic has been represented, and what has been left out of these representations. More fundamentally, I wanted to rethink what it really means when we speak of “landscape”.
Therefore, before examining the Arctic landscape, I would like to firstly reflect on the concept of landscape.
The term landscape can be traced back to the thirteenth-century Dutch language. It originally refers to a region or tract of land[1]. When the term entered English in the late sixteenth century, its meaning gradually shifted from “territory” to “scenery” or “view”[2].
In the 1980s and 1990s, particularly from the perspective of social constructivism, scholars in visual culture and cultural geography began to conceptualize landscape as a way of seeing[3]. In these studies, landscape is not simply a natural setting, but a cultural construction shaped by art, media, and ideology.
After that, in the past decade or so, scholars in cultural geography have increasingly argued that we must move beyond treating landscape solely as an image, because landscapes are also spaces that are lived, felt, and practiced. This shift, represented by what has come to be known as non-representational theory[4], focuses on embodied experience, emotion, and the material qualities of place. While this theoretical turn has deepened our understanding of landscape, it has also divided the field, between representational and ideological studies on the one hand, and affective or material approaches on the other.
So I started to think whether it is possible to establish a theoretical framework that brings these two approaches together, which recognizes the politics of representation, while also attending to the emotional and material dimensions through which landscapes are lived and practiced.
The work of American visual culture scholar W. J. T. Mitchell offered me important inspiration. In his book Landscape and Power[5], Mitchell emphasizes that landscape should be seen as a process, and in this process our interactions with the environment are made visible through it.
Mitchell further distinguishes among three interrelated concepts: space, place, and landscape. Space is abstract, and it is structured by power relations, institutional rules, and symbolic systems. Place is concrete and embodied. It refers to the specific sites we live and sense. Landscape is shaped by the symbolic structures of space while simultaneously carrying the affective and material force of place.
While reading his work, one argument in particular caught my attention. Mitchell referred to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic model of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real[6], suggesting that place may be understood as bearing the qualities of the Lacanian Real, as traumatic or historical site.
Lacan’s triadic model was originally developed to explain how the subject is positioned within language, images, and the structures of the unconscious. According to Lacan, human experience unfolds along three intertwined dimensions: the Symbolic is the order of language, law, and social structures that organize our sense of reality; the Imaginary is the realm of images and identification, where we construct a coherent sense of self and world; and the Real is the unrepresentable, the traumatic, and the materially resistant, that which cannot be fully captured by signifiers or images.
Based on both Lacan and Mitchell’s frameworks, I propose a hypothesis: landscape should not be understood merely as either a representation or an experience, but, as Mitchell suggests, an ongoing, emergent process. The generative force behind this process, I argue, originates in the Lacanian Real.
Building on this hypothesis and Lacan and Mitchell’s theoretical foundation, my research centres on a core question:
How can Lacan’s triadic model of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real help us to reconceptualize the notion of landscape, thereby offering a deeper understanding of the dynamic processes that shape place, space, and landscape in the Arctic?
To explore this question more concretely, I divide it into three sub-questions:
Q1: Within Mitchell–Lacan’s theoretical framework, how can we understand place as the Lacanian Real in landscape studies?
Q2: How are Arctic landscapes constructed as visual objects in different media to serve ideological or discursive purposes?
Q3: How do power relations shape Arctic landscapes, and how does Lacan’s triadic model clarify the subject’s capacity to negotiate or contest these power-related contexts?
These three questions correspond to different ways in which space, place, and landscape interact.
These research questions guided my analysis of four case studies, each of which explores the Arctic landscape through a different medium.
My first article[7] focuses on the relationship between landscape and space, or more specifically, the tension between landscape and the Symbolic Order in Lacan’s sense.
In this article, I analyse two Chinese documentaries about the Arctic: Rediscovering the Arctic and The Light Chaser. These films draw on China’s Shanshui[8] visual tradition, which is the aesthetic conventions rooted in classical Chinese landscape painting, and construct a culturally resonant image of the Arctic. Through the shanshui-inspired visual aesthetics, the documentaries transform the Arctic from an unknowable other into a legible and possessable visual asset.
I argue that the Symbolic Order, in the construction of landscape, converts the act of seeing into a practice mediated by institutional and ideological structures. In doing so, landscape becomes a surface onto which cultural desires are projected, and the visual order shapes how the Arctic is imagined.
My second article[9] focuses on how the Real, in Lacan’s sense, manifests through what I call anti-landscape[10].
In this article, I distinguish between two types of anti-landscape. The first type is still visible and representable, but carries negative aesthetic and ideological meanings. For instance, industrial sites, degraded shorelines, polluted zones. These spaces disrupt dominant visual narratives of the Arctic, but remain within the Imaginary, as fractured or contested representations.
The second type is called “lost landscapes”[11]. These are spaces that have fallen out of representation altogether. These places are no longer maintained in symbolic or visual systems. They are neglected or socially withdrawn. They resist narrative integration and aesthetic resolution, and thus point more directly to the Lacanian Real. These anti-landscapes expose the limits of the visual representation itself. In Lacanian terms, they mark a rupture in the landscape. They indicate the blind spots and resistances built into the way we imagine and frame the Arctic.
The third article[12] examines how the experience of place is shaped by spatial organization and discursive power. The case study focuses on Pyhä-Luosto National Park in northern Finland. By combining participant observation with a discourse analysis of multilingual visitor reviews, I identify a divergence: domestic visitors tend to focus on the landscape and its aesthetic and national significance, while international visitors emphasize physical activities like hiking and skiing.
I analyse how institutional apparatuses such as conservation policies and interpretive texts work alongside institutional technologies like maps, signage, and trail systems to construct and manage visitor experience. I realized that these elements script the way visitors move and see within the national park.
I argue that the Symbolic Order plays a central role in disciplining perception. What feels like an “authentic” or “immersive” experience of place is in fact structured through rules and power. So the feelings of connection and placeness are not outside of structure but produced by it. Affective and embodied experiences can be shaped through institutional discourse.
The fourth article[13] shifts focus to the relationship between place and landscape. This article focuses on two Arctic-themed games, Arctico and Never Alone, to examine how spatial-temporal landscapes are constructed through a blend of visual, emotional, and interactive practices. Here, I shift the focus from how landscapes are represented to how they become experiential forms, and how they translate the localized, embodied place experiences into playable, affective environments.
In games, landscape becomes a performed place where the player does not just see, but feels and acts. The digital space translates the unrepresentable, affective residues of lived experience into interactive forms. Gamescapes[14] are thus sites of secondary place-making, where place is actively constructed through the engagement of the game mechanics. The players can co-construct new forms of landscape experience through interacting with the console or other digital devices.
After introducing the four articles, let’s now return to the research question of this dissertation:
To the Sub-question 1: Within Mitchell–Lacan’s theoretical framework, how can we understand place as the Lacanian Real in landscape studies?
I think place can be understood as an open, dynamic field of potentiality. The Real is a zone of resistance and emergence, where symbolic structures begin to break down and new meanings can take place. With this dimension, a place is not only a site of trauma or absence as Mitchell emphasizes, but a source of generative force.
As we mentioned, I see landscape as an attempt to mediate between representation and the affective ruptures that exceed it, and it provides visual forms that temporarily stabilize this process, and offers viewers and inhabitants a sense of coherence. However, because the Real can never be fully captured by the Symbolic Order, what remains is an irreducible residue, a permanent lack that continually eludes representation. This lack generates the subject’s primal drive to pursue and to make sense of what can never be fully attained. So, this restless movement of desire constitutes the dynamic essence of landscape.
To Sub-question 2: How are Arctic landscapes constructed as visual objects in different media to serve ideological or discursive purposes?
This dissertation examines how different media deploy distinct visual logics and symbolic technologies to construct the Arctic landscape in ways that serve particular ideological or discursive purposes.
The first article shows how Chinese Arctic documentaries draw on the visual logic of Shanshui aesthetics. These films recode the Arctic through a familiar visual regime, and the images are deeply informed by geopolitical aspirations and state ideology.
The second article analyses how photographic images produced by energy corporations and environmental NGOs frame the same Arctic sites in conflicting ways. The photo from the official website of the energy company emphasizes harmony and development, but photos provided by environmental organizations foreground crisis and destruction. These images condense counter-discourse onto visual form and shape public perception through aesthetic strategies.
The third article demonstrates how national parks construct landscape through institutional design. The experience feels natural and unplanned. But behind that sense of spontaneity lies a subtle reinforcement of cultural norms about nature and the sense of belonging.
In the fourth article, despite their differing themes, the two games rely heavily on established Arctic visual symbols. The difference is that Arctico reinforces a romanticized vision of the Arctic as a pure, uninhabited wilderness, while Never Alone reinterprets those same visual symbols through Indigenous myths and storytelling. In doing so, Never Alone transforms the gamescape into a form of interactive cultural memory.
Across all media, the Symbolic Order operates especially through visual technologies, to mediate desire, shape subject positions, and structure the possibilities of encounter. The visual media actively participate in constructing the cultural legibility of the Arctic.
Regarding Sub-question 3: How do power relations shape Arctic landscapes, and how does Lacan’s triadic model clarify the subject’s capacity to negotiate or contest these power-related contexts?
The third article shows how national parks function as ideological and affective spaces: visitors are guided by institutional discourse, but their experiences are meanwhile not fully determined. Drawing on Lacan, I argue that the subject is structured by the Symbolic Order, but also split by its failures and contradictions. Visitors may deviate from or even resist dominant narratives, and these acts can subtly reconfigure their relationship to place.
Similarly, the fourth article reveals how players can re-narrate and reconfigure Arctic landscapes through immersion and interaction in the virtual space. Sometimes they can also challenge the predefined storylines or symbolic framings. In these cases, the gameplay can be a space of micro-resistance.
Taken together, power in landscape production operates on multiple levels: it structures visibility, positions subjects as viewers, visitors, or users, and it shapes the possibilities for emotional and sensory engagement. But subjects can negotiate and resist, and sometimes recreate dominant representations through their lived and situated practices.
To conclude, this dissertation seeks to reconceptualize landscape through Lacan’s triadic model by bringing the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real into dialogue with Arctic space. The Arctic, as a contested and transnational region, is shaped by layers of geopolitical, ecological, and cultural representation. Through four case studies, I argue that the Arctic landscape is a relational and processual formation emerging in the tension between spatial discourse and embodied experience.
While this study is theory-driven and does not draw heavily on ethnographic material, I see that as a starting point for future work, especially with regard to indigenous perspectives and lived experiences. I also hope the framework here offers tools to engage with environmental breakdown, and digital landscape studies. As climate change reshapes the Arctic, how we see and feel landscape must also shift. And I believe, that will be where theory and practice meet.
I respectfully ask you, esteemed University Lecturer Juha Ridanpää as the opponent appointed by the Faculty of Humanities for the public defence of my doctoral dissertation, to present your criticisms of my doctoral dissertation.
Notes
[1] There are multifaceted alterations of the Dutch origin of this word, with various interpretations like “region, district, province, countryside” and so forth. In general, it refers to an identifiable area of land.
[2] Antrop, Marc. 2018. “A Brief History of Landscape Research”. In Peter Howard et al. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies. Routledge, 2nd ed, 1. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315195063-1.
[3] This conceptualization of landscape as “a way of seeing” derives from Denis Cosgrove’s (1985) seminal essay “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10 (1): 45–62, which builds on John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin) and Raymond Williams’s reflections on culture and nature. It reflects the broader “cultural turn” in the social sciences (see Chaney 1994; Bonnell, Biernacki & Hunt 1999) and the influence of social constructivist theory (Berger & Luckmann 1966) in reshaping landscape studies through visual and ideological perspectives.
[4] The term “non-representational theory” was introduced by cultural geographer Nigel Thrift to describe approaches that emphasize practice, affect, and embodiment over representation. See Nigel Thrift (1997) “The Still Point: Resistance, Expressivity, Embodiment, and Dance,” in Steve Pile and Michael Keith (eds.) Geographies of Resistance, (London: Routledge), 124–151; and Thrift (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge). For an overview of how this theoretical turn reshaped cultural geography, see also Hayden Lorimer (2005) “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-Than-Representational’”, Progress in Human Geography 29 (1): 83–94.
[5] Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. 2002. Landscape and Power. University of Chicago Press.
[6] W. J. T. Mitchell (2002) discusses Lacan’s tripartite structure in “Preface to the Second Edition of Landscape and Power: Space, Place, and Landscape,” in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed) Landscape and Power, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), vii–xii, drawing on Jacques Lacan’s ([1966] 2006) formulation of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (W.W. Norton & Co ). Mitchell adapts Lacan’s model to explore how landscape mediates between the visible order of representation and the material or affective residues that resist it.
[7] Xue, Chenru. “Arctic in Shanshui: Landscape of Chinese Arctic Documentaries.” Submitted for peer review.
[8] The term Shanshui (山水) refers to the traditional Chinese landscape painting aesthetics that emphasize harmony between human and nature.
[9] Xue, Chenru. 2023. “The Anti-Landscapes of the Arctic: Understanding Circumpolar Sea–Land Relationships from a Lacanian Perspective.” In Savitri Jetoo, Jaana Kouri & Silja Laine (eds.) Understanding Marine Changes: Environmental Knowledge and Methods of Research, 43–66. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.
[10] The notion of anti-landscape refers to spaces that fail to sustain life or resist aestheticization, for instance, sites of environmental degradation, industrial ruin, or social neglect. The term has been used in environmental humanities to describe dysfunctional or damaged environments that emerge from modern industrial and capitalist processes. See David E. Nye & Sarah Elkind, eds. 2014. The Anti-Landscape. Leiden: Brill. Nye defines anti-landscapes as spaces that “do not sustain life” and thus expose the ecological and moral costs of human activity. This concept resonates with critical geography and visual culture studies that examine the ruptures of landscape under industrial modernity and climate change.
[11] Also see Maunu Häyrynen. 2014. “Lost landscapes: degraded landscape as anti-landscape.” In D. E. Nye & S. Elkind (eds.) The Anti-Landscape, 149–158. Rodopi.
[12] Xue, Chenru. 2024. “Decoding Differences in Nature Park Visitors’ Experience: The Case of Pyhä-Luosto National Park.” Tahiti 14 (1): 33–53. https://doi.org/10.23995/tht.142757.
[13] Xue, Chenru. 2024. “Reconstructing Arctic as Gamescape: Historical Authenticity in Arctico and Never Alone.” WiderScreen 27 (1–2). https://widerscreen.fi/numerot/1-2-2024-widerscreen-27/strongreconstructing-arctic-as-gamescape-historical-authenticity-in-emarctico-emand-emnever-alone-em-strong/
[14] The concept of gamescape was first proposed by Shoshana Magnet (2006) in “Playing at Colonization: Interpreting Imaginary Landscapes in the Video Game Tropico,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 30 (2): 142–162. Magnet uses the term to describe the ideological and spatial logics embedded in game environments, viewing the virtual landscape as a site that reproduces discourses of colonialism and capitalism. Subsequent scholars (e.g., Paul Martin 2013; Souvik Mukherjee 2022; Stefan Schubert 2018) have expanded the notion to emphasize gamescape as a dynamic and practical space co-constituted through player agency, affect, and spatial-temporal practice. In this sense, the gamescape functions also as an affective and participatory landscape in which meaning emerges through interaction.