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Crosscut: Photography exhibit at Seattle Asian Art Museum showcases our complicated relationship with wilderness

By Brangien Davis / Crosscut

The human relationship with the natural landscape is complicated. We are forever trying to get our bodies closer to nature, whether by painting it, taking selfies in it, hiking around in it or insisting on homes with a view. We are awed by untouched wilderness, yet fill it with our detritus. We want to get “back to the Earth” and bend it to our will.

The human-landscape relationship comes into sharp relief in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on Contemporary Forms, a compact but compelling new show of six artists at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. The show’s title references Chinese artist Zhang Huan’s 1995 photograph “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain,” a striking and disorienting piece in which several naked people lie on top of each other at the summit of Mount Miaofengshan.

The horizontal strata of their bodies echo the vertical ridges of a mountain range in the distance. But their flesh looks alarmingly soft against the scrub grass, like some strange snail that has lost its shell. Their alignment — dark-haired heads blurring together into one black line — feels more architectural than sexual. What on earth are they doing up there?

They are making a mountain taller with human intervention, and in the process making an entirely new mountain. Curator Foong Ping explains that the artist based the photo (and the performance it captured) on a saying: “Beyond the mountain, there are higher mountains yet,” which points to the impetus and folly of trying to best nature. The subjects’ nudity (“his idiom is naked people,” Foong noted) reflects our desire to be at one with nature, while at the same time being dwarfed by it.

Nearby, the rhythmic whoosh of ocean waves beckons visitors into a small, curtained room. Step inside for my favorite section of the show: two single-channel videos that cascade like scrolls from ceiling to floor. Projected on opposite walls in the calm, darkened space, these are Yang Yongliang’s “The Departure” and “The Return” (both from 2019).

Sit for a spell as the black-and-white images emerge slowly from the mist. Squint and you’ll start to see jagged mountains appear — but look even closer, and you’ll notice that these monoliths are made from so many skyscrapers. A rushing waterfall proves to be a highway packed with cars. Those trees? Construction cranes. The artist created these astonishing works by combining thousands of photographs and videos from megacities, thereby painting a natural landscape from man-made ambition.

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Ariel
1 year ago

I went to go see this exhibit in Friday, and Yang Yongliang’s art was definitely my favorite. The detail and the way they made natural beauty of very much grey urban elements was just so fascinating! Definitely worth a visit.