Chinese landscape painting has a long, rich tradition, and the art in an exhibition at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum gives new, creative perspectives on that tradition. And the artists whose works are featured have world-class reputations.

The curator behind the exhibition is Yibing Huang, associate professor of Chinese and curator of the Chu-Griffis Asian Art Collection at Connecticut College.

The idea was to have a group show that would touch on the Chinese landscape tradition while increasing an understanding of contemporary art, something that would showcase the artists’ diversity, vitality, energy and vision.

The resulting exhibition, “Chinese Landscape Rethought,” is not about an ancient genre but rather about fresh takes on that genre.

The show, which runs through June 9, features pieces from 11 people, some of whom are based in China and some of whom are based in New York. Huang notes that these artists have global vision. The themes touched on range from suppressed histories and voices to dislocated cultural identities to global contemporary art and politics.

In the traditional shanshui (“mountain-water”) form, artists use brush and ink to create scenery, although it isn’t meant to be strictly realistic.

“It’s imaginary. It’s really an escape of the mind, if you want to put it that way,” Huang says.

Huang believes that New England residents will feel a connection with landscape art, even though the classically Chinese works are different from, say, those of the Hudson River School or American impressionism.

The exhibition is wide-ranging. One piece seems to merge Chinese landscape painting with Van Gogh’s style. Another appears like a serene, muted landscape until a viewer notices a ghostly, barely visible military plane flying over it. Yet another work is a photo that snaps a moment in which a seemingly endless array of bricks, wrapped in red ribbon as if they were gifts, are spread out along the Great Wall of China.

The latter is Zheng Lianjie’s “Huge Explosion: Binding the Lost Souls.” This 1993 performance installation is a renowned work that, as the exhibition notes, is an “homage to wounded history and memories and also an epic ritual to invoke and remember the anonymous ‘lost souls’ as symbolized by the bricks.” Zheng Lianjie, along with a variety of other people, including nearby villagers and students, took more than 10,000 bricks that had broken and fallen from a damaged section of the Great Wall and attached the aforementioned red ribbons.

Another pioneer whose work is shown at the Lyman Allyn is Gu Wenda. He is an important figure from the Chinese avant-garde movement of the 1980s, taking conventional Chinese ink into an abstract realm. His “White Squares” is featured here, with the titular white squares covering and almost entirely obscuring black-and-white abstractions.

Greeting museum-goers to the Lyman Allyn exhibition are Zhang Hongtu’s epic “The Bikers,” scrolls that combine photos of modern bicyclists on their way to work with echoes of past art and politics. As the exhibition text describes the scrolls, “these bicycle commuters in contemporary Beijing are emerging from the depth of ‘Lofty Mount Lu,’ 15th-century literati landscape masterpiece by Shen Zhou, and heading toward a gray horizon that, enveloping a famous poem ‘Snow,’ by Mao Zedong, in Mao’s own calligraphy, seems foggy or smoggy and elusive.” (A related note: text is significant in the genre, and some artists play with text in their pieces.)

The exhibition also showcases Cai Dongdong’s multimedia video installation “Black Tiger,” which shows a tribal community in an isolated area of China that is fading away as the young adults in the group depart for the cities in search of employment. In the show’s gallery guide, Huang notes that “Cai Dongdong calls his work ‘a monument in memory of a tiny human tribe that will soon vanish.’ We often lament the destruction and pollution of the natural environment. However, what about the destruction happening on another dimension? That is, what happens to the ancient landscapes that had borne and safeguarded generation after generation of human dreams and memories, if their indigenous inhabitants or people are now impelled to abandon them? Doesn’t that idealized picture of ‘empty mountains,’ when taken in its most literal sense, equally spell the utter demise of the landscape art tradition itself? Where do we draw a line between landscape as a purely imaginary, non-committal, elitist art form and a more directly interventionist and socially engaged art form? Ultimately, what kind of co-existence or co-dependence should there be between landscape or shanshui and their human counterparts in our global world, so that we can all ensure to live meaningful lives and create meaningful art?”

In the booklet accompanying the exhibition, Lyman Allyn Director D. Samuel Quigley writes, “Thanks to economic, political and technological progress, we can now begin to explore the creativity of contemporary Chinese artists without as much baggage as in the past and ponder their work on equal footing with their peers all over the globe. As with other traditions (including our own), we would be wise to recall historical context as we attempt to sense and understand the artists’ intent. To me, this is the pleasure — sometimes confounding — of responding to contemporary art, and it is particularly fascinating to see Chinese landscapes in a new light.”

If you go

What: “Chinese Landscape Rethought”

Where: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 625 Williams St., New London

When: Through June 9

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. and 1-5 p.m. Sun.

Admission: $12 adults, $9 seniors, $5 students, $7 active military personnel. Admission is free for kids under 12, for museum members, and for New London residents.

Contact: (860) 443-2545, ext. 2129; www.lymanallyn.org