Rejecting the sentimental approach to nature, Segalen generally describes it through the filter of “pictorialism” which translates into art a fragment of the world, a landscape. Only Un grand fleuve (1912), an application of Segalen’s theory of exoticism to an extraordinary travel experience, abandons these codes to restore the vital power of water, of the Yangzi river. But even in that case, the world is not any more perceived as an ecosystem, as a play of interrelations involving the human being.