NEW YORK, NY.- “But when one was born down there, it is of no use; nothing else seems to mean anything.” – Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), letter to Philippe Solari, Talloires, July 1896
Cézanne wrote these lines in the summer of 1896 from the shore of Lake Annecy, in the French Alps. The scenery was spectacular, and he admitted as much. But it was not Provence. He painted the lake anyway, in a series of watercolors that leave most of the paper bare, so that the water is little more than the white of the page. One of them, Coin du Lac d’Annecy, hangs in this exhibition. Fifteen years after it was made, it crossed the Atlantic for Cézanne’s first solo exhibition in America, at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291.
A landscape is never painted from nowhere. Every artist arrives at the land already carrying another one, whether a birthplace, a faith, a memory, or a fear, and the work is shaped as much by what they bring as by what lies in front of them.
Terrain, a new group exhibition at Shin Gallery, is built around that idea. It gathers works made across nearly two centuries, from a Hokusai woodblock print to paintings completed this year, by artists ranging from Paul Cézanne, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston to Neil Jenney, Alan Sonfist, and Choong Sup Lim. Spanning screen painting, woodblock printing, watercolor, oil, photography, and mixed media, the exhibition sets chronology aside in favor of conversation, letting works from different centuries and continents answer one another across the room.
The oldest works in the room treat land as something sacred before it is something seen. An early nineteenth-century Korean lotus screen unfolds across twelve continuous panels, more than four meters wide. For Buddhists, the lotus rising clean from the mud was a symbol of purity; under the Confucian Joseon dynasty, which pushed Buddhism into private life, it came to stand for the faithful scholar. Screens like this one were placed in scholars’ studies as a daily reminder of the virtue they meant to cultivate; in dialogue with it, Katsushika Hokusai’s Pilgrims at Roben Waterfall (ca. 1832) shows travelers bathing beneath the falls to purify themselves before climbing Mount Oyama. In both works, the ground is not scenery, it is a discipline.
For other artists here, terrain is the place they could not stop returning to. Joseph Stella, best known for his electric visions of industrial New York, painted Mountain Landscape, Muro Lucano (c. 1922–23) of the southern Italian town where he was born. Three artists of the CoBrA circle turned the land inward. Svavar Guðnason painted Myllan (The Mill) in wartime Copenhagen in 1942, first exhibiting it simply as Landscape Painting. Else Alfelt distilled mountains, sun, and moon into the luminous geometry of The Blue Eternity (1948). Else Fischer-Hansen, painting from the coast of North Zealand, called her abstractions “psychological images”: nature observed, then rendered as the feeling it left behind. For each of them, as for Cézanne, the land is never only in front of the painter – it is also behind the eyes.
Photography asked for a different discipline: not memory, but attention. In 1928, on the coast of Maine, Paul Strand photographed a cobweb beaded with rain and a length of weathered driftwood. Eleven years later at Point Lobos, Edward Weston photographed kelp floating on the surface of the Pacific. Both artists worked close and slowly, as if the scale of a subject mattered less than the patience brought to it.
In the work of later generations, the ground becomes something that can be lost. Neil Jenney’s Southbound and Southbound (1969) belongs to the raw, deliberately plain paintings later grouped under the name “Bad Painting,” works that stage the meeting of people and nature without commentary, leaving the viewer to draw the conclusion. Alan Sonfist, whose practice grew out of a childhood fear of disappearing forests, planted Time Landscape in Lower Manhattan as a living re-creation of the woodland that stood there before the city; his Mud Slide California (1991) turns to the earth in motion. Choong Sup Lim, who grew up in the farming town of Jincheon and has worked in New York since 1973, carries both places in Well (1978). Chantae Wright, born in Queens and working in Miami, builds Maps (2026) from New York architecture and the color of Caribbean neighborhoods and transit lines: a terrain of streets as much as soil.
Terrain offers no single answer to what land is. Across these works it is sacred ground, home ground, remembered ground, and ground under threat. It is also the ground each of us stands on while looking.
Featured artists: Katsushika Hokusai, Paul Cézanne, Joseph Stella, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Svavar Guðnason, Else Alfelt, Else Fischer-Hansen, Neil Jenney, Alan Sonfist, Choong Sup Lim, Chantae Elaine Wright, Mel Arzamarski, Andreas Emenius, and a nineteenth-century Korean lotus screen.
