Objective  Overseas Chinese gardens are of great historical significance for the exchange between Chinese and foreign garden culture, and give overseas people the opportunity to get close contact with Chinese garden culture. At present, there are two kinds of mainstream thinking and research trends in this research field: first, understand the differences between overseas Chinese gardens in terms of action modes and effects in cultural communication under the background of globalization; second, consider how to integrate traditional Chinese culture into modern western life in the communication phenomenon with gardens as the media. This research discusses the above two research trends.

Methods  Nowadays, the infinite extension of technology and the disorderly expansion of capital have plunged the output of contemporary Chinese art and cultural works into the dilemma of symbolic fast-food communication. Body experience has become the focus of research in various fields, providing us with a new perspective to reflect on the output mode and effect of Chinese culture and art. In the landscape space of Chinese gardens, the body serves as the subject of watching and sightseeing. The changes in space and scene make people's cognition constantly change in body experience, and become the most important way for people to appreciate and understand culture. This research selects three types of overseas Chinese gardens as typical cases to obtain a clearer glimpse of the path exploration and cognitive status quo of the communication of Chinese culture at home and abroad. Although these gardens have great differences in construction time, construction characteristics and operation method, they are all obviously featured by the collision between eastern and western cultures in terms of physical environment and cultural experience, and all achieve substantial development in their respective countries through running-in. This research, based on the characteristics of "embodied cognition", such as embodiment, situation, enactment and dynamic, takes the physical experience of tourists and the representation of garden culture as the starting point to explain, from the three perspectives of "body perception", "artistic conception metaphor" and "experience interaction", how overseas tourists gain the contemporary cognition of Chinese culture through landscape experience in the exchange and reciprocation of body and spirit.

Results  Through body perception, the antique gardens represented by The Astor Court, by virtue of their exquisite garden elements and space combination, show "Chineseness" to the public in the early stage of external communication. The Astor Court represents the cohesive and typical oriental gardens, which provide an ideal and accessible physical prototype for overseas audiences for the first time, enabling them to gradually transform from the fragmented and scattered collection of Chinese elements into a new stage of building an architectural environment with Chinese cultural atmosphere. Through the metaphor of artistic conception, modern exhibition parks such as Between Sky and Earth and Dule Garden convey to tourists China's long-standing aesthetic feelings and cultural orientation with a brand-new posture. Dule Garden is taken as an example here. In the space of hundreds of square meters, the exhibition park extracts the cultural themes that repeatedly appear in ancient Chinese paintings, and creates a poetic space atmosphere using the geometric space language common to both China and Western countries, supplemented by modern garden materials, thus highlighting the spirit of Chinese classical gardens. Through experience interaction, the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Sydney and other overseas gardens, driven by cultural exchange and cultural trade, have created a unique garden culture brand through rich and wonderful cultural experience activities, and have promoted the elegant Chinese culture and art to the overseas public, thus well interpreting the deep integration of embodied performance and space-time environment, achieving the effective display of Chinese gardens in the cross-cultural context, and helping overseas tourists understand and share Chinese culture in depth.

Conclusion  The research finds that through the above three ways, overseas Chinese gardens explore tourists' cognition in landscape experience and trigger diversified exploration and imagination to promote the overseas communication of Chinese culture. Meanwhile, the research attempts to show that the theory of "embodied cognition" about Chinese gardens can broaden the thinking for the research on landscape design, landscape experience and external communication of Chinese gardens.