Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?

di admin
22 Luglio 2014

Paul Kos, Sound of Ice Melting, Kadist collection (Paris), Courtesy the artist

Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? considers visual, perceptual, and conceptual systems that have become increasingly unstable, both physically and metaphorically. Across various regions, situations, and contexts, artists are tracking our changing experience of nature as a space in image making, reproduction, and replication.

This exhibition at Guangdong Times Museum invites creative perspectives to connect two distinct geographic and cultural contexts, California in the United States and the Pearl River Delta region in China: from the cybernetic utopia and technology frontier to the world factory of electronic products; from the natural romanticism and ecology movements to massive urbanization and land struggles. The featured artworks touch upon subjects such as nature, landscape, the urban garden, virtual reality, digital technology systems, and their junctures.

The exhibition proposes possible links between this seemingly new, technologically mediated perspective versus ways of looking at the world that are rooted in traditional Chinese philosophy. In the latter, the works of humanity, far from imposing order on the landscape, seem designed expressly to conform to its natural contours. This corresponds with a cultural value system that views humanity and nature as sharing a common structure, their order and forms resonating and flowing in dynamic balance. The exhibition calls upon ideas of change, interconnectedness, and imagination inspired by Chinese traditional art and how they provide a vision, experience, and memory of landscape.