SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? considers how the intersection of nature and technology shapes our current understanding and experience of landscape and gardens. By examining two very distinct geographic and cultural environments—the utopian frontier of California, home to both Silicon Valley and a vast variety of natural wildernesses, and the Pearl River Delta region in China, primary producer of the world’s electronic products which faces massive urbanization and land struggles—the exhibition questions whether human activities have altered the geological ecology so extensively that a new form of nature is being created, both physically and metaphorically.
The show consists of 26 works by 21 artists, with the majority on loan from the Kadist Art Foundation plus the addition of 5 Chinese artists, three of whom were commissioned to create new work in response to the exhibition’s specific theme.
The exhibition’s title refers to Félix Guattari’s chart of the “four ontological functors”: the virtual and the actual, and the real and the possible—a theoretical structure proposing the deterritorialization between form and matter.
Through the lens of landscape, the exhibition poses the following questions: What is the mirror effect between landscape and technology, and how does each inform how we understand and experience ourselves and the other? How do different perspectives and approaches affect our mental images of landscapes? The voluntary organization of the landscape, the making of natural, intentional, and artificial gardens, and nature’s disruption of the urban built environment—have all found their way into our contemporary visual thinking.
The Anthropocene discourse and its extended cultural and social debates serve as the broader background for considering the works in the exhibition. First put forward by the Nobel Prize- winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene proposes that we are entering a new geological epoch. It claims that since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have altered the environment so extensively that a new form of nature has been created. Geologically, humankind’s self-created sediment layer has spread and encompassed the globe.
Our individual realities are today increasingly fractured and multiplied by the frame of the computer and smartphone screen. What are the relationships between these micro-frames and the larger world? What lies outside of the frames? Whereas actual landscapes rely on perspectives, views, and vistas, the screen compresses and flattens space. According to Anne Friedberg in her 2006 book, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, the screen fosters “static, moving, multiply layered, obliquely angled, abstract, sequential, or multiple-frame images.” What integral qualities of the material world are preserved when it is translated into visual art, as artists track our experience of the stuff of nature?
The exhibition proposes possible links between this seemingly new, technologically mediated perspective and 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.
Inclusive of subjects such as nature, landscape, the urban garden, virtual reality, digital technology systems, and their junctures, the exhibition features work by Lucas Blalock, Elina Brotherus, Marcelo Cidade, Tacita Dean, Charles Gaines, Vidya Gastaldon, Paul Kos, Liang Shuo, Anthony McCall, Alicia McCarthy, Charlotte Moth, Simon Pyle, Hiraki Sawa, Maaike Schoorel, Lois Weinberger, Zhao Renhui, Zhou Tao, and Toby Ziegler with new commissions from Chen Xiaoyun, Tsang Kin-Wah, and Zheng Guogu.
Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? was curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); Ruijun Shen, Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou); and Xiaoyu Weng, Kadist Art Foundation (Paris / San Francisco).
