Historically, shanshui painting was not merely a vehicle for capturing the majesty of the mountains and bodies of water but a means of evoking a landscape of the mind. The refined aesthetic of elegantly rendered mountain ranges, meandering paths and flowing waterfalls in a shanshui composition was just as important as the thoughts it expressed about nature, giving the ink painting genre a distinctly philosophical inflection.

Shanshui: Echoes and Signals is a thematic exhibition animated by ideas about landscape. What elements constitute a landscape? How has our relationship with the natural landscape transformed over time? And what are the implications of the proliferation of virtual realms? Exploring how mountains and water have shaped our connection to the world, the exhibition considers the relevance of shanshui today while thinking through notions of landscape, temporality, and transformation.

In this conversation with curator Silke Schmickl, we discuss the shanshui tradition, sensory experiences of art, and how the exhibition attests to signals of artistic, sociopolitical, and technological change. This interview is part two of a series reflecting on Shanshui: Echoes and Signals. Click here to read Schmickl’s introductory essay in part one.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the ink tradition of shanshui. In what ways does this influence assert itself throughout the exhibition?

The exhibition opens with a presentation of artists’ creative responses to the ink canon. It features ten paintings that play with various forms of abstraction, from Liang Quan’s flat geometric collages to Xu Bing’s conceptual Landscript series depicting mountains formed from Chinese characters. Works by Hu Youben and Chen Jialing draw on the interaction of ink and paper to let the liquid create a topography.

Yang Jiechang’s 11-metre-long ink painting on silk, Black & White Mustard Seed Garden (Tale of the 11th Day Series) (2009–2014), spans a full wall and can be viewed like a film. This forest scene featuring animals and humans engaging in sexual acts amid thickets of trees and bushes addresses topics of power and domination but also reproduction and life-generating natural order.

In the centre of the room, Chua Chye Teck’s Scholar’s Rocks (2013–2018) presents recycled concrete fragments from Singapore construction sites on beautifully handcrafted wood bases that elevate them to objects of meditation. Overlooking these works is a gigantic glass vitrine activated by Guo Cheng’s new commission, Becoming Ripples (2024). A mirrored fabric, literally bringing viewers into the picture, evokes water ripples when triggered by a kinetic system that also intermittently projects silhouettes of mountains. The anima that reigns in this enclosed space suggests other spiritual experiences in the rooms to come.

How do the works expand the aesthetic of shanshui to invite new ways of seeing the landscape?

Sakumi Hagiwara’s Kiri (1972) is an observational 16mm film evoking the ink tradition with its slow unveiling of a mountain chain among the mist, while Yan Lei’s photorealistic paintings play with optical effects. Ink master Wucius Wong’s sublime Sky-Land Expression #15 (2003) evokes an aerial view of a mountain range or a water stream, capturing the dynamic of elements in flux. Presented alongside it are four paintings by Wai Pong-yu that harness the poetic rhythm of ink lines flowing out on the wet paper.

Lines and stratifications can also be found in Awazu Kiyoshi’s Sky Sea West East (1980) lithograph, a densely layered graphic orientation map in which north and south are replaced by the sky and the sea. In Chen Guanghui’s Landscape (2007), a traditional shanshui painting underwent various degrees of digital abstraction before being transferred in lacquer onto nine wooden panels. Such experimentation and combinations of conventional and newer, even digital, techniques play an important part in the contemporary interpretation of the tradition.

Elsewhere, works by Tanatchai Bandasak and Guo Hongwei study elemental rocks and crystals to demonstrate how a universe can be found in the smallest fragments of nature if only we pay attention.

The exhibition brings about many encounters with invisible, alternative or imaginary worlds. How does this relate to the overall theme?

Kan Tai-keung’s and Nicholas Party’s paintings set the tone for a speculative exploration of how the interaction of these different worlds can be artistically expressed. Together, they seem to ask: how do we speak about the spiritual dimension or conceptions of other worlds that can only be subjectively imagined and not universally expressed?

A pair of white monochrome artworks by Shioyasu Tomoko and Chung Chang-Sup propose a lyrical framework. The three suspended synthetic paper panels of Shioyasu’s Root of Heaven (2006), perforated with motifs of roots and water, are dramatically lit to cast a shadow unveiling the reality lying behind them. In Chung’s Return 77-N (1977), the viewer is invited to project their own imagination onto the fine mulberry paper on canvas.

Chang Chao-Tang’s extraordinary 16mm film The Boat Burning Festival (1979) documents Taiwan’s triennial worshipping ceremony of Wangye. Synced to Mike Oldfield’s 1975 progressive rock album Ommadawn, the work expands its relevance beyond the local. Installed opposite is Yeesookyung’s Flame Variation 3-4 (2013), which enacts another fire ritual with its split-mirror vision of hell on a traditional scroll.

Traditionally, shanshui paintings were meant to elicit sensory aspects of being in nature. Likewise, the exhibition activates sensory modes of experiencing the artworks.

Three daylight galleries in the exhibition recall sensorial experiences in nature as artworks interact with natural light and movement. Vivian Wang’s Imitations of Shanshui (2024) presents a rotating, woven and colourfully lit mountain landscape. It is surrounded by an interactive acoustic architecture with richly layered sounds from nature.

In Lee Ufan’s site-specific, large-scale installation Relatum – The Mirror Road (2021/2024), visitors are invited to walk over a bed of pebbles and a polished mirror flanked by two massive rocks. The dynamic element of the mirror, with its countless visual reflections, evokes a river, while the gateway of rocks emanates a feeling of rest and stability. From the cold light in the morning to the warm tones of the sunset, the work is in tune with nature, and the sounds of the footsteps on the pebbles create an organic melody.

Another melodic landscape responding to atmospheric variations is realised in Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture garden. Set up against the city’s skyline, it features five galvanised steel sculptures, which gain their volume from the layering of three two-dimensional metal sheets—a signature trait of his experimentations with industrial materials that beautifully modernised traditional sculpture. Sky Mirror, Rain Mountain, Wind Catcher, Root & Stem, and Mountains Forming (1982–1983, recreated in 1984 and 2019) all allude in their forms and titles to nature. They are sonically animated by Vivian Wang’s ever-evolving soundscape Drawn to Light (2024), which is responsive to lux levels and audience’s movements in the room. A city of shanshui par excellence, with its mountains and bodies of water, Hong Kong is brought into the picture, suggesting that these aesthetic experiences and contemplations could well extend beyond the confinements of the museum.

Natural landscapes are a potent reminder of the many timescales that govern life on the planet, from the vastness of geological epochs to the cyclical rhythms to which various species adhere. How does the exhibition engage with and activate different temporalities?

Time as an agent of change, rupture, and evolution is explicitly referenced in a room nested between Lee Ufan’s and Noguchi’s installations. It presents works that illustrate different conceptions of time—from a fleeting moment to durational, regenerating interpretations. These works resonate with other time-based experiences across the exhibition, and encourage visitors to meditate on rituals and the transformative process of artmaking and its perception.

Tsuyoshi Hisakado’s conceptual black-and-white diagram speculates on cosmic time, the laws of nature, and the universe. Miyajima Tatsuo’s large-scale digital installation Region No. 43701–No. 43900 (1998) is a view of an electronic landscape in which counting digits, excluding the number zero, reflect on ideas of regeneration and recreation as a principle of life. It is echoed by Rirkrit Tiravanija’s embossed calendar prints The Time travelers calendar A and B (2013), addressing the act of mark-making and the concept of cyclical time. Elsewhere, Sookoon Ang’s video diptych 4PM (2016) forms a portal in which two short sequences of a seascape and a rock maquette are eternally looped. The dialectical relationship between shan and shui is the most explicitly expressed in this work.

Xue Zijiang’s silver gelatine prints from the 1950s speak of their time and the timeless majesty of mountains. Similarly, RongRong and inri’s photograph presents a dramatic mountain landscape in which a barely visible naked figure evokes a sense of scale and the larger order of time and space. Designer Stanley Wong’s flip clock live now 2: now (2011) reminds us constantly about the present, the only aspect of time that we possibly understand and own. Liu Jianhua’s majestic porcelain wall sculpture Blank Paper (2009), whose breathtaking craft combines fragility and grandeur, stands as an eternal symbol of possibilities. Together, the still and moving images form a constellation and propose philosophical interpretations of our human existence.

How do some of the works play with light and sound to activate explorations of perception and perspective?

Two new co-commissions by Nguyen Trinh Thi and Amar Kanwar anchor experiences of light and sound. Nguyen’s expanded cinema installation 47 Days Sound-less (2024) draws attention to historical time, a contextualised and dynamic constituent of human life. Moving images of the tropical forest, Indigenous mountain communities, and extracts of American and Vietnamese war films create awareness of how Southeast Asian history has been distorted under the influence of foreign rule, war, and mainstream media.

The pluralistic perspectives rendered through the device of this animistic apparatus are echoed by Kanwar’s seven-channel work The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023). Here images and texts come and go, relating a series of fables about human behaviour. Good and evil coexist in society, and a dark planet can be bright when receiving light from the sun. Both Nguyen’s and Kanwar’s works abandon the idea of a single frame or unique viewpoint, creating a productive sense of disorientation that highlights the necessity of multiple perspectives and entry points when reflecting on complex societal questions.

Few landscapes in the Anthropocene remain untouched by human presence. What does the exhibition have to say about the relationship between humankind and nature?

The exhibition ponders human interventions into nature: a necessary move for human progress, yet freighted with the responsibility of careful resource management. A series of works reflect this tension, placing materials in new relationships with each other. Yu Ji’s concrete sculpture, in which two divergent bodies are held together by a metal ring, is placed alongside Anzai Shigeo’s 1976 photograph of a small abstract sculpture by Kishio Suga that exemplifies the formal possibilities of bringing contrasting materials together. In Yang Xinguang’s Xie Ju (The Way of the Measured) (2007), two sets of stones illustrate the coexistence of two kinds of order, one controlled and square, the other loose and round, both necessary and complementary as they are created from the same batch of stones. Finally, Leelee Chan’s totem-like sculpture Endless Consumption (2015–2017) is composed of packaging waste coated in plaster resembling marble.

The dynamic between solid and liquid plays out across several works. Xie Nanxing’s large oil painting reminds us of environmental crises with its black puddle of oil slowly flowing towards us, while Zao Wou-ki’s lithograph and etching from the 1960s evoke the wild forces of the ocean. Yoshioka Tokujin’s Water Block (2002), a masterfully crafted optical glass bench, is filled with light, contrasting with these dark streams as a reminder that nothing is static, all is in flux.

Video works by Ana Mendieta and Tong Wenming portray each woman’s personal interaction with the earth: the former to establish a physical connection as an immigrant in a new land, the latter to gain a better understanding of the world through the endurance of natural forces. Their simple yet powerful gestures suggest the taxing but fertile potential of bodily interventions into landscapes.

By contrast, the impact of a state undertaking radical transformations of the land is creatively exposed in Liu Chuang’s seminal video installation Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018). This work portrays the Zomia region of the Southeast Asian Massif, which encompasses several countries and nearly one hundred million people. The Chinese government’s massive investment in large-scale hydraulic infrastructures, which have recently been repurposed to become China’s largest bitcoin-mining factories, coexist with mountain minorities who resist the centralised power by maintaining their diverse linguistic and ethnic traditions. The complex history of Zomia is formally addressed through three video channels that combine historical and contemporary images from the region, as well as sci-fi classics of world cinema. It reminds us of how our understanding of the world is increasingly mediated through technology and how radical speculative land interventions are not just relegated to futuristic fiction.

Could you elaborate on the communication trail that extends throughout the exhibition?

The importance of modern communication is a central aspect of the exhibition. Isamu Noguchi’s Radio Nurse and Guardian Ear (1973) presents an invisible form of communication between an ear and a baby monitor shaped like an abstracted head. Other objects from the M+ design collection installed throughout the galleries include Kuramata Shiro’s Lamp (Oba-Q) (1972)—which resembles a sheet ghost—as well as radios and a handphone, prompting reflection on how these communication devices, operating through invisible waves and electronic signals, not only fulfil their intended function but also lend themselves to contemporary rituals and forms of communication that are sometimes interrupted and animated by digital spirits. As evoked in Liu Chuang’s work, the location of such infrastructures is generally remote, and often unknown to the user. Their physical impact on nature, however, is very real, as layers of communication networks under and above the earth form parallel, invisible worlds. As we use natural resources to power massive computer farms and process digital information, our technological progress is redistributing Earth's matter from physical atoms to digital information. It will eventually reach a point of saturation when digital bits will outnumber atoms on earth.^[1] Scientists predict an information catastrophe when digital content will account for more than half Earth’s mass.^[2]

Rounding out the show’s exploration of the intersection between nature and technology is Park Hyunki’s Untitled (1987/2018). Here, two towers of television sets rest on stones which also appear on their screens, eliciting a meditation on their materiality and the transcendence of their physical objecthood by way of the screen.