Does new M+ exhibition based on East Asian ink landscape paintings go too far or not far enough?
- ‘Shanshui: Echoes and Signals’ aims to expand the notion of shanshui – East Asian ink landscape paintings – and bring it to ‘the level of our contemporary world’
- It is in many ways successful in what it sets out to do, but exhibits of electronic items may raise eyebrows, and there is a lack of historical context
“Shanshui: Echoes and Signals”, the new exhibition at Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture in West Kowloon, adopts an all-embracing approach to the genre of East Asian landscape painting that originated in China over a thousand years ago.
But some might wonder whether it has spread its arms a little too far. As a fellow journalist asked the curators during the press preview: since the exhibits include radios and a mobile phone (the actual physical items), is there anything that couldn’t have been shown here?
To say that a 1989 NTT Docomo TZ-803 – one of those clunky first-generation mobiles we call “Big Brother” phones in Hong Kong – is relevant to a reconsideration of shanshui, which literally means mountain and water in Mandarin, is typical provocation from a museum with a mission to level the silos and flatten hierarchies between different artistic disciplines.
“We really want to bring the show to the level of our contemporary world,” says Silke Schmickl, the Chanel lead curator for moving image at M+.
“Extractions from the mountains, the digging for minerals, the shortage of some of these materials, have become very tangible for us. Without the mountains and water and energy, we wouldn’t have any of these [new technologies].
“I think these tools are sort of prompts for us to think that [shanshui] is something that is embedded in our understanding of the world as a whole.”
