Landscape in art is always being reimagined. Across multiple solo presentations in the Discoveries sector of Art Basel Hong Kong 2022, we find evidence of artists turning to new kinds of landscapes – a move, perhaps, towards a new Romanticism. This renewed interest may in part be fuelled by the failure of the Enlightenment ideal, by pharmaco-ecological disasters, and the chaos that the illusion of rational neo-liberal progress has produced. The quest for the rural that comes through the work harks back to the Romantics’ rejection of post-revolution instability. Just as Romanticism in the past has responded to geopolitical instability and the failings of hegemonic systems, we see it rise again in our fraught, global reality.
Whether real or imagined, landscapes invoke the pre-agrarian existences of hunter-gatherers, foragers, and nomads with their intimate knowledge of their surroundings. Tracing these relationships today, however, as the rural blends with the urban, requires gentle and speculative excavations of the vast topographies that compose the contemporary world.
In Dusadee Huntrakul’s commission for the Singapore Biennale in 2019, The Map for the Soul to Return to the Body (2019), ceramics made from low-fired red clay, extracted from the Ban Chiang Archaeological Site in the Udon Thani province of Thailand, recall archaic forms and Bronze Age shapes. Gesturing towards a prehistorical, pre-national, pre-Buddhist moment, Huntrakul’s flaring pots resemble the whimsical shapes of Haniwa or Jomon-ware – ancient Japanese earthenware that features humanoid figures or intricately coiled cord patterns. Huntrakul’s sculptures are displayed with placards citing contemporary concerns such as right-wing nationalism and war, together with proposals to alleviate the climate crisis.
Bronze and ceramic sculptures similarly characterize the artist’s new series, 'A Lens to See the World Through' (2021), presented in the Discoveries sector by Bangkok CityCity Gallery. Forms include two-headed coils that evoke the uneasy coexistence of beings, and a pile of mushrooms, that hints at the capitalist-ecological ruins described by Anna Tsing in her landmark book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). Elsewhere, hyper-realistically rendered drawings of geckos, a common inhabitant of Bangkok, are shown nesting in walls, making their homes amidst the urban detritus.
Two distinct timelines overlap here: one measured in eons tracing the evolution of lifeforms, from reptilian to mammalian dominance of the earth’s ecosystem, and one measured in millennia, of civilizational and proto-historical evolution from Stone Age to Bronze Age. The artist seamlessly captures the interconnectivity and coexistence of disparate temporalities, and critiques the fundamental flaw of anthropocentric teleology in the grander scheme of geological time.
The surprising confluence of geological strata provides the subject for Cisco Jiménez’s paintings, presented by Maia Contemporary, Mexico City. Combining brightly colored, figurative cross sections of archeological digs, Jiménez’s canvases are full of the consumer goods, technological gadgets, and representational symbols that populate our visual culture. While resembling orographic diagrams and illustrative dioramas found in natural history or science museum displays, they are not didactic, but rather embody an irreverent humor and ironic optimism.
Turntable with a (Muestreario) of Organic Forms (2020) is centered on a jagged phonograph player raised on a monumental platform, not unlike the Mayan pyramid in Chichen Itza in Mexico. The exposed mound in the painting is punctuated by crisscrossing AV cables that form a mountainscape of their own, while the sky is full of colorful ores and gemstones. This juxtaposition reveals material and cultural irreconcilability among pre-Columbian histories, colonial exploitation, and postmodern economies.
Fan Xi proposes a journey into nature that resists human narratives outright. Presented by CLC Gallery Venture from Beijing, her series ‘Temptation’ (2021) comprises collages of photographs she took in the deep jungle of Pulau Dinawan, a small tropical island off the coast of Borneo in East Malaysia. The artist describes, how, during her residency there, she was seduced by the terrifying mystique of the rainforest at night and decided to throw herself into its dark embrace. Fan creates the sculptural photomontages by cutting silhouettes out of leaflets to create leaves and tendrils, which curl and protrude from the wall, casting entangled shadows. The sensuality of the twisted mass of vegetation, arouses in viewers an archaic desire for untainted nature.
For Tap Chan, the material landscape is a portal to an immaterial world characterized by inner turbulence and night terrors. Chan’s piece in ‘Breaching Sanctum’, a group exhibition curated by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, in May 2022, addresses the spatial dysmorphia of the mind’s internal architecture, a psychic landscape that resembles the strangeness of dreams. While for the booth of Hong Kong’s Mine Project, Chan stages an installation with materials including beeswax, Polycaprolactone, metal railings, and real and artificial plants potted in Jesmonite. This eclectic collection of objects presents the viewer with the artist’s idiosyncratic dream-logic through kinesthetic disorientation, associative repetition, and nonsensical paradoxes. A chronic insomniac, Chan’s dreamscape is so vivid precisely because of its plasticity, tactility, and sensuality – it so clearly evokes the slippage between lucid dreams and waking life.
If dreams and sleep are the most private realm of an individual, then they can also be the most political, and most unutterable. As John Keats wrote in 1817, ‘The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream – he awoke and found it truth.’ The somnambulist’s landscape is at once a field of psycho-political resistance, subconscious neurological phenomenology, and shamanic mythology. The mind is the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the new landscape, which predates history, defies borders, and outlives pandemics.
Nick Yu is a writer based in Hong Kong.
Top image: Fan Xi, from the series ‘Temptation’, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and CLC Gallery Venture, Beijing.