Miguel Angel Ríos
Piedras Blancas
2014
Video
4'53''
Courtesy the artist, KADIST and Gallery Wendy Norris

In Piedras Blancas, more than 3,000 white spheres made of concrete and rock tumble down a mountainside, raise a cloud of dust, and eventually settle in the same place, as if completing a quick and long migration. Shot by Miguel Angel Ríos in Argentina, where he grew up, and Mexico, his home for many years, this artwork seems to mirror his life’s own turbulent trajectory.

Su-Mei Tse
“Stone Collection II”
2018
Five found stones on pedestal, wood, sand
Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery

Su-Mei Tse’s “Stone Collection” encompasses two actions. First, she searches for and collects stones, a game-like activity that is also a favorite children’s pastime. For the artist, choosing which stones to collect “is a very personal and intuitive process.” Second, she presents these stones to viewers, inviting them to scrutinize things that normally elude their attention. In the present age, “seeing” has become a disciplined behavior: stimulating, novel, rapidly changing images distract people’s attention, submerging them in uninterrupted excitement. The silence and stability of these stones, on the other hand, offer a counterpoint to the “noise” of looking.

Wang Sishun
Apocalypse 16.9.1
2019
Aluminum sculpture
300 x 100.5 x 36.7 cm; 160.5 x 39.5 x 49.5 cm
185.5 x 49.9 x 30.8 cm; pedestal: 350 x 80 x 19 cm

Wang Sishun has collected hundreds of stones that resemble “portraits” from various parts of the world, presenting and representing them in myriad ways. These portraits seem to condense various races and identities, and to express different value systems—the human figures in classical paintings and sculptures, too, could be classified according to the idealized form they embodied. By “carving and creating,” nature resembles humans; this suggests that nature has agency, yet such agency is endowed by the humanities, such that nature and humanity form a collaborative, open-ended cognitive system. In this exhibition, Wang uses aluminum to magnify three large versions of these stone portraits. One resembles a reaper’s scythe, or the protector god of the Egyptian Pharaohs, Horus, with his eagle’s beak and human’s body. Alongside his tall body, other deities seem to stand. The neatness and slanted angle of the composition evince a mysterious, admonitory air, a sense of ritual found in obscure religions. However, these rocks, created over a span of time that exceeds that in which humans and gods were formed, have now become a modern prophecy.

Li Weiyi
Cairn
2018
VR installation
Dimensions variable
Courtesy digital art platform OUTPUT

Li Weiyi digitally scanned the exteriors of four stones and transformed them into a virtual reality scene. There is a twist, however: the viewer is trapped inside the stones, looking at their surfaces. The binary concept often symbolized by surface and core—representation and reality—is here inverted, with neither aspect assuming a superior position. Meanwhile, the audience is immersed in a hermetic, spherical, weightless visual space, reminiscent of Peter Sloterdijk’s spatial studies into microspheres, according to which we live in “bubbles” (blasen), imaginary constructions that return us to the comfort of the womb and shelter us from the potential harm of the outside world. In Cairn, because interior and exterior are inverted, such ease and danger come to seem like an unstable illusion.

Wang Xiaoqu
Green Screen
2018
Oil on canvas
60 X 80 cm
Courtesy M WOODS Art Museum

Crossing the River
2019
Oil on canvas
120 x 150 cm

Landing
2019
Oil on canvas
180 x 130 cm

Through her paintings, Wang Xiaoqu explores the rich indeterminacy of images. She has collected many photographs from the internet, cut them out, and pasted them onto a single surface, allowing these images to achieve a kind of dispersed signification. To the artist, the photograph is always open-ended, able to contain the intentions and thoughts of both the photographer and the artist. Qigong practitioners and movie stars, hunchbacked figures crossing rivers, a certain famous office building in Beijing’s Wangjing sub-district, seaside tourists, and astronauts: each of the subjects in her paintings evinces an ambiguity of form. Evoking a strong, narrative desire, Wang’s brushstrokes seem to describe the movements of people or objects. The texture of her paintings gives her human subjects a supernatural sheen, as though they were made not of flesh, but of smooth or rough stones.

Lin Xue
“Untitled”
2012
Ink on paper
45 x 5 x 83 cm x 12
Courtesy Gallery EXIT and the artist

Ever since his childhood, Lin Xue, who grew up in Hong Kong, has loved mountain forests. In particular, he was fascinated by the pits of fruit that dropped from one of these trees. For this series of twelve drawings, the artist expanded on his visual experience of these fruit pits, then blended them with his impressions of mountainous rocks. The grooved surface of each pit resembles the ridges and rivers on a mountain, sheltering tiny growths of plant and animal life, and suspended on a white sky, like a celestial body. However, these artworks, which appeared in the 55th Venice Biennale, are neither conceptual drawings nor realist depictions, but speak instead to the artist’s profusion of interests coming together in the mind. Lin has discovered an imaginary path of freedom through nature, then used this as a method to plainly depict nature.

Yan Xing
Fine Modern Furniture
2019
Cloth, stones, light (1920s-1930s)
Dimensions variable

After visiting the former headquarters of The Renaissance magazine, Yan Xing wrote a short story with modern design as its backdrop. In this story, a piece of uncut jade is excavated from reinforced concrete, after which it competes with various other metallic materials to win the admiration of viewers and is ultimately “reborn” under the chandeliers in a corridor where The Renaissance’s offices once stood. Lit by these artificial, luxury design products, the story teases out the relationship between beauty and imitation, suggesting a parallel between how light is “pursued” by the jade and how it is stored and used by the chandeliers. By synthesizing archival material, physical matter, literature, and art theory, Yan seeks newer, more precise articulations of identity.

Timur Si-Qin
Juniper
2019
3D printed material, acrylic
150 x 86 x 122.5 cm

Timur Si-Qin’s recent work evinces a moral outlook that exceeds humanism: namely, the belief that the laws obeyed by humans are only a part of those that govern the material world at large. In Juniper, Si-Qin uses 3D printing technology to recreate the juniper tree that grew near Georgia O’Keeffe’s residence in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. In this work, viewers can see a riotous growth of various local fauna. The work also foregrounds the concept of “New Peace”: a new relationship between humans and nature that draws its formal appeal from the language of advertisements. Encountering this piece, viewers are reminded of creation myths that do not accord with science, in which a life is conceived from, nourished by, and born of innate matter.

Zhao Yao
Something In the Air
2019
PVC laminated fabric
1484 x 1431 x 698cm

This artwork is an inflatable model of a stone, engraved with the Tibetan words བསམ་བློའི་མཐོ་ཚད་ཀུན་གྱི་མཆོག, or “Spirit Above All.” It has been magnified one million times. The original stone was specially produced by a local Mani stone artisan for the “Spirit Above All” series, for which Zhao carved the phrase onto many rocks of different sizes. As part of the project, in 2016, Zhao Yao unfurled an abstract cloth installation 116 meters tall by 86 meters wide in a mountainous area of Tibet, exposing it to the elements for half a year before presenting it in Beijing Peoples’ Stadium on 18 May 2018. Using Mani stones as inspiration, the artist has now created his newest artwork Something in the Air, a “huge but hollow” inflatable Mani stone. Perched between sky and sea, the air inside seems to be charged with a certain energy. The artwork seems to ask: how does our knowledge—cultural, political, or religious—influence our perceptions of art?