Re-viewing nature

Published: 12:30, February 9, 2024 | Updated: 15:08, February 17, 2024

Re-viewing nature

By Chitralekha Basu

A new exhibition at the M+ museum draws attention to the myriad ways in which artists continue to revisit and reinterpret older ways of depicting nature as well as where they stand in relation to it. Chitralekha Basu reports.

Nguyen Trinh Thi’s immersive audio-visual piece, 47 Days, Sound-less, a highlight piece of the Shanshui: Echoes and Signals exhibition at M+, offers audiences a choice of multiple and simultaneous viewing possibilities. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Nguyen Trinh Thi — whose immersive multimedia moving-image experience, 47 Days, Sound-less (2024), is a highlight of the newly opened Shanshui: Echoes and Signals exhibition at M+ — has an interesting story about how she came to name her piece. A co-commission by M+, the Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum and Singapore Art Museum, 47 Days invites viewers to look at war movies shot in the jungles of Southeast Asia from an angle that’s different from the regular cinema experience. While Nguyen has used footage from action sequences in Hollywood movies set in Vietnam in her piece, she chose to focus solely on the natural landscape that serves as the backdrop, having edited out the human figures entirely.

In a way, the foregrounding of the natural vistas of Southeast Asia in combat films is also about calling attention to the sons and daughters of that soil — often similarly relegated to the background or subjected to cultural appropriation by Hollywood. Nguyen, who uses Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) as a point of departure in her work, mentions that though Coppola’s film is set during the Vietnam War, it was shot in the Philippines, where “they hired a whole village of the indigenous Ifugao people to stand in for Vietnamese people”.

InWater Reflection, Swiss artist Nicolas Party borrows some of the conventions of traditional Chinese ink landscapes, while using soft pastel hues to realize his idea. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

One of the channels in 47 Days follows the indigenous people living in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as they prepare for a death ritual. When Nguyen came to know that the Ifugao people observed a similar ritual, she became curious about the distance between the two villages in Vietnam and the Philippines, and the time it would take to travel from one to the other.

It was 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic was raging in full force. “Since there were no flights operating during the pandemic, Google Maps said the journey would take 47 days on foot.”

In 47 Days, Nguyen uses multiple circular mirrors tilted at different angles to capture details of the natural landscapes beamed by one of the projectors. The reflections — close-up shots of leaves and water percolating down them, for instance — are distributed across the floor, walls and ceiling, simulating the feeling of walking into a somewhat fantastical forest for the viewer.

“I wanted to fracture the images and make them behave like sounds,” says the artist. “I also wanted to make a departure from the experience of watching movies, where you’re looking only at the image in front of you, whereas sounds could come to you from anywhere in the environment.”

Kan Tai-keung’s Universe/Nature/Man combines ancient Chinese cosmological ideas with a sleek, minimalist ethos inspired by the Grande Arche in Paris. (CALVIN NG / CHINA DAILY)

From Park Hyun-ki’s stacked television sets with rocks, to one of the earliest mobile phone models from 1989 released by NTT Docomo, to the Takt Project Inc-made sculptures showing electronic components suspended in acrylic, Shanshui: Echoes and Signals offers glimpses into how artists and designers negotiate their relationships with new and existing technologies. (CALVIN NG / CHINA DAILY)

Good things come in pairs

The Chinese portmanteau word shanshui translates as “mountain and water”. On a basic level, Shanshui: Echoes and Signals is about a coming together of the vertical and the horizontal. The show draws attention to the geometry of this relationship between opposites — extending the trope to include that between nature and machines. It also celebrates the fact that there is an infinite variety of ways of finding meaning in these binaries.

“One of the key principles that guided the pairing of artworks in this exhibition is that we have all these different forms of art in our collection — from objects, to urban design to moving image to visual art,” says Silke Schmickl, Chanel lead curator of Moving Image at M+. “We wanted to use this opportunity to take some risks and put together artworks that usually do not belong in the same space in the context of a thematic show.”

She mentions the pairing of Zao Wou-ki’s abstract landscapes (1968-69) with Tokujin Yoshioka’s Water Block (2002). The bold, sweeping brushstrokes, evoking nature in its elemental state in the former, resonate with the innumerable ripples on Yoshioka’s glass-and-stainless-steel sculpture resembling a turbulent wave frozen in motion. “It’s about the sense of movement in the works of both artists and how they relate to each other,” says Schmickl. “This show is really about activating different ways of seeing and moving away from the theological, art-historical lineage and toward making actual connections.”

Zao Wou-ki’s untitled landscape. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Endless Consumption made out of found objects by Leelee Chan. (CALVIN NG / CHINA DAILY)

Water Block, a piece implying water frozen in motion by Tokujin Yoshioka, appear to be in dialogue with each other at the M+ exhibition. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Cultural exchange

Several artists featured in Shanshui are into revisiting and reinterpreting traditional Chinese ink landscapes, especially those done in the literati style. Originating during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), the literati school favored a subjective treatment of reality, with emphasis on composition and stylization, resulting in the juxtaposition of unlikely elements within a single frame.

Cloud Mountain (1982-83), a series of galvanized-steel sculptures by Isamu Noguchi, is a striking example of artists paying homage to a tradition, or conceit. Noguchi celebrates the two-dimensional representation of landscapes in traditional Chinese ink paintings by taking away volume from his sculptures. At the Shanshui show, the cutout-like Noguchi hills are presented together with sculptures inspired by the skyscrapers in the artist’s adapted hometown of New York. The Hong Kong skyline with its own horizontal sprawl of rectilinear buildings across Victoria Harbour, visible through the glass wall of the gallery, lends the scene an added resonance.

Isamu Noguchi’s galvanized-steel sculptures of rising hills celebrate the two-dimensional appearance of natural forms in traditional Chinese ink painting. By placing some of these sculptures in a gallery with a view of the iconic Hong Kong landscape across Victoria Harbour, M+ curators have enhanced the feel of a communion between the natural and the man-made. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

While Shanshui includes examples of artists from the West borrowing the Chinese idiom — Water Reflection (2022) by Swiss artist Nicolas Party — and vice versa, some of the exhibits combine the best of both worlds. Universe/Nature/Man (1997) by Kan Tai-keung, one of Hong Kong’s best-known ink painters and a graphic-design pioneer, illustrates a seamless fusion of the artistic philosophies of the East and West. Kan says he was inspired by La Grande Arche — a 110-meter cubic monument in Paris. It struck him as an example of the perfect square. He borrowed the sleek, minimalist design of the structure, interpreting it in the context of the ancient Chinese cosmological model — which visualizes the sky as a circle and the earth as a square.