In China, there remains a chasm between the image of the Anthropocene and how it is imagined. That disconnection manifests critically in contemporary Chinese art, the diversity of which reflects various directions in the Chinese environmental imagination. This paper examines the work of Cai Guo-Qiang, Yao Lu, Yang Yongliang, and Chen Qi. In the first part of the paper, I argue that the grammar of Chinese environmental art and art criticism in the work and reception of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Falling Back to Earth series and The Ninth Wave are epistemically inundated with rigid binaries between humans and their environment. Cai’s celebrated status within the international art market cannot be ignored, particularly when considering its “depoliticization, professionalization, [and] commercialization” as a system of circulating commodities. I then discuss Yang Yongliang’s inventive video installation Phantom Landscape, which captures the destructive outcome of environmental managerialism in the form of a classical Chinese landscape painting. Phantom Landscape dispels simple assessments of selecting a single Chinese orientation towards nature to be historically true. Instead, acknowledging the futility of settling on a final state of the environment or society, the viewer must turn their attention to the rift between aesthetic or cultural intentions and material construction of society. In contrast, Yao Lu’s photomanipulated series, New Landscapes, is more ambiguous. Through image fabrication, Yao Lu reinvents garbage as a symbol of civilizational excess into a natural phenomenon. He indeed mimics the shanshui style, but ultimately underscores the need for new artistic approaches in this era beyond aesthetic appreciation for nature. Finally, Chen Qi’s work insists upon returning to the political functions of art, placing emphasis on the physical act of making woodcuts and the implications of selecting such a medium. Inherent in the mobilization of woodcut imagery in the present moment is a glimpse of ecological futurity that bends rigid notions of geologic and human separation within an artistic and public sphere.BR Their visualizations not only clarify the viewer’s imagination of ecocritical theories that are often phrased in abstract language, but they also ground these ideas in a non-Eurocentric social and cultural history. In different ways, these artists evoke ecocritical thought and heighten the theoretical possibilities for both environmental consciousness and contemporary Chinese art. These contrasting approaches underscore how visual art as a medium serves as a starting point in engaging with China’s environmental outcomes in a culturally specific context. Their observations underline interrelations, balance, and parallelisms between humans and nature, rather than furthering the managerial mindset of the status quo. Anticipatory yet withholding prescription, each artist disrupts conventional framings of the China ecological crisis in their creations, directing the viewer away from the strictly anthropocentric and instrumental understandings that dominate the present state of environmental affairs.