Strictly speaking, there are only surfaces covered with marks. The rest is human interpretation of them. This could be argued that 'there are examples of graphics where shapes and colours are not employed to represent data'.

The answer to this might be:

'We agree that any conscious design activity implies some kind of analytical thinking. And where there's analysis, there's data. Therefore, any graphic design is dealing with representing data, and so there's no entity as Data Visualisation which would be separate from any other designing activity. And in turn, this proves that Data Visualisation is a term which was created artificially.'

I.e. we came up with term 'data visualisation' so that, on one side, we'd have a certain theoretical framework to facilitate working with what interests us most, and on another, to make sure clients pay us more and with greater ease.