This is a photograph by Chinese artist Don Hong-Oai.
Wait, did I say “photograph”? What I meant to say was… no actually, this is totally a photograph. From Utata Sunday Salon’s bio by Greg Fallis:
Long Chin-San, who died in 1995 at the age of 104, had developed a style of photography based on the long tradition of landscape imagery in Chinese art. For centuries Chinese artists had been creating dramatic monochromatic landscapes using simple brushes and ink. These paintings weren’t intended to accurately depict nature, but to interpret nature’s emotional impact. …
Long Chin-San, who was born in 1891, had been trained in this classical tradition of painting. At some point in his long career, Long began to experiment in ways to translate that impressionistic style of art into photography. In keeping with the layered approach to scale, he developed a method of layering negatives to correspond with the three tiers of distance. Long taught his method to Don. Don, seeking to more closely emulate the traditional Chinese style, added calligraphy and his seal to the image.
Here’s a Flickr set of a bunch of other photos. Here are four other of my favorites: [1] [2] [3] [4].