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24 Jan 2025 / by Silke Schmickl

Reinterpreting ‘Shanshui’ for the Present

Three free-standing, galvanised steel sculptures feature sharp angles, smooth curves, and perforated sections. Each piece interacts with the light and shadow of the room.

Installation view of Shanshui: Echoes and Signals, 2024. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong

M+ curator Silke Schmickl delves into the inspiration behind Shanshui: Echoes and Signals, examining important features of the classical Chinese painting genre and how they’re translated and transformed in the exhibition.

Shanshui: Echoes and Signals is an exhibition featuring over 100 works from the M+ collections, along with three site-specific commissions and several key loans. As the title suggests, it has been curated based on principles of resonances, lyrical associations, and formal and conceptual correspondences that exist between works from various artistic disciplines, predominantly originating from Asia over the last six decades. Rather than illustrating the rich canonical scholarship established around the ink tradition over millennia, the exhibition instead draws inspiration from critical aspects of shanshui that continue to strikingly inform artists’ practice in the present day.

A white-walled gallery featuring five sculptural works: a circular pile of broken stones, and a square of cut stones, a glass seat, a tall, thin piece, and a low, freestanding structure resembling an ‘N’ in the corner. Wall-mounted works and a moving image piece are displayed throughout the space.

Installation view of Shanshui: Echoes and Signals, 2024. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong

Naturally, it contends with the universal and timeless subject of the landscape. It testifies to artists’ continuous engagement with art history, as well as the aesthetic, psychological, and political potential of the land that surrounds them. One of the central features of the ink painting tradition is the multitude of perspectives inherent within individual paintings, ranging from close-ups of rocks, water streams, and trees to aerial views of mountains and seas. This stands in stark contrast to the Western convention of one-point perspective, which suggests a singular, linear viewpoint. Viewings of shanshui works were intended to engage all our senses to see, hear, feel, and even smell what the represented scenery had to offer. This immersive approach to looking at art places the beholder at the core of the experience and is made tangible for viewers of this exhibition through a polyphony of sensorial stimuli that resonate across the galleries.

In a dark room, a ceiling-suspended projector and mirrors reflect moving light onto dark walls. A shadow from the projector and mirrors falls onto the wooden floor within a lit rectangle.

Installation view of 47 Days Sound-less (2024) by Nguyen Trinh Thi, 2024. Commissioned by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+, and Singapore Art Museum. Acquisition in progress. ©Thi Nguyen. Photo: Silke Schmickl

In the Chinese literati tradition, the unrolling of a scroll constitutes an event. Scholars gather to view, study, and debate art objects, calligraphy, and poetry. These collective aesthetic experiences allow intellectuals to reveal their cultivation and express their personal feelings. Objects spark conversations on society, politics, and philosophical speculations on other non-tangible, spiritual worlds that resonate with artists’ faculty of imagination. In the exhibition, the interdisciplinary pairing of artworks enhances these fluid shifts between distinct functions and realities, forming portals and thresholds for viewers to wander through. Screen and audio technology is present throughout to draw further attention to the increasing dichotomy between physical objects and digitally created worlds. The switching on of projectors, TV monitors, and loudspeakers activates other registers and echoes the gesture of unrolling a scroll. Some of the digital artworks are remotely controlled by the artists, further blurring the notion of locality.

A large eight-panel ink painting depicts a dense forest, clouds, rocks, humans, and over 100 animals engaging in activities such as resting, socialising, and copulating amid detailed natural scenery.

Yang Jiechang. Black & White Mustard Seed Garden (Tale of the 11th Day Series). 2009–2014. Ink and mineral colour on silk mounted on canvas. M+, Hong Kong. © Yang Jiechang

A key curatorial aspect of the exhibition is the dialectical relationship between mountain and water. By simply dissecting the term shan (mountain) and shui (water), the two antithetical elements—one solid and still, the other fluid and moving—start forming a productive field of tension. Yet both elements are mutually dependent. Mountains are shaped by water; rain forms at the edge of mountain chains; bodies of water dry out and crystallise into rocky deserts. What both elements have in common is the critical role they have played as raw materials and energy sources necessary for the industrialisation and subsequent digitalisation of our societies. These revolutionary moments of modernisation drastically changed our relationship to the world. This inspired the expansion of the motif of nature in this exhibition to encompass manmade physical and virtual environments when considering the relevance of shanshui today. Shanshui: Echoes and Signals speaks ultimately about conceptions of time, signals of change, artistic and societal transformations that echo each other, and rituals that persist, evolve, and return as guarantors of transmission and consistency.

A dark-walled gallery features a three-channel video installation depicting mountainous regions. A figure casts a shadow on the screens. A seat is positioned in the foreground.

Installation view of Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018) by Liu Chuang, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Acquisition in progress. © Liu Chuang. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong

Conceived with no beginning and no end, the exhibition’s rhizomic structure echoes our networked world and is animated by waves of expression that arise from the interdisciplinary constellations. As a speculative thematic presentation of the M+ collections, it exemplifies the power of art objects in space, inviting us into a conscious experience of time that engages both the body and the mind. The exhibition captures shanshui’s progressive and open philosophical essence that places viewers at the centre of the experience, giving them agency to make their own meanings in the interstices that exist between physical, virtual, and imagined realities.

This essay is part one of a series reflecting on Shanshui: Echoes and Signals. Stay tuned for part two.

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