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Three papers focus on medieval Buddhist art to examine how religious communities grounded their practices in the natural terrain: the layering of Buddhist sites in the making of city axes, the carving of arhat caves into mountain formations, and the depiction of the nine-mountain-eight-seas cosmogram on pagoda bases. A fourth paper turns to 20th-century Jiangnan to examine how artists evoked regional geography through modern landscape painting, drawing on and transforming earlier aesthetic vocabularies. This juxtaposition invites a reassessment of the temporal framework of "modernity," and its potential relevance to studies of environments and artistic practices across time. By treating Jiangnan as a generative site where artists and patrons engaged with land, ritual, architecture, and text to inscribe meaning and negotiate place, these case studies aim to contribute new perspectives to broader art historical conversations on geo-aesthetics, material ecologies, and the spatial dimensions of artistic practice.