Nicole Zihua Zhang (張梓華)

initially published in The Collection Auction Magazine in 202o. see: https://view.inews.qq.com/k/20200716A0Z92900?no-redirect=1&web_channel=wap&openApp=false

Art invariably seeks to provoke, to unsettle, and to assail our consciousness. Undeniably, after the initial visual shock delivered by a spectacular work, what remains is space for us to excavate and contemplate its subtleties. In my view, such arduous and outstanding artistic practices embody the ambition of the artist, a determination to confront difficulties head-on, and a passion not unlike Kuafu’s mythical pursuit of the sun. I would treat such a piece as a pure work—arresting and compelling, perfectly defining the very idea of “art as landscape.”

This is the kind of art presented by the recent exhibition Consenseus: Man in the Chinese Garden at the OCT Boxes Art Museum. At first, the title seems unlikely to connect with the participating artists. Yet, upon approaching the museum, lingering briefly outside before entering, I encountered the jagged sculpture Lion. It was instantly recognisable as He An’s work: a fragmented lion carrying historical symbolism, its inversion dictated by sculptural tension, its perforations and drains evoking the ruins and voids of contemporary society. In a single moment, both power and collapse are condensed. Yet the exhibition’s title redirected my thoughts towards an imagined modern garden, momentarily to a Futurist vision of alien terrains, before returning me to this present site.

As I walked through galleries laden with impassive industrial materials, ceramics, and stone, what crossed my mind? The sensation was akin to being submerged in water, or wandering within a desolate lunar base, or traversing the otherworldly garden of a parallel dimension. For curator Shen Ruiyun, this project was an opportunity to pursue long-standing interests in the garden. She spent half a year identifying suitable artists, another half year travelling with them to study gardens and historic architecture (a record of these trips from Shanxi to Suzhou appears in Man in the Garden), before developing proposals and realising the exhibition. Altogether, nearly two years of labour were invested, with the aim of creating an open, harmonious garden space—one that she describes as “the garden laid bare.”

To interpret the works merely through the lens of the garden would, however, be insufficient. While they continuously seduce the eye, the space is also heavy, oppressive, and overwhelming. Whether wholly immersed or uneasily tentative, one senses the lingering aura of the garden, yet never encounters the natural pleasures remembered from lived experience. Still, these commanding works compel us to capture their allure, as if locked in a tug-of-war with aesthetic forces—an encounter that ultimately yields an inner resonance rather than a mere optical impression. The viewer, through experience rather than concept or image, delineates a memory of the garden walk. We stand before the art in reverence, perceiving quietly, seeing almost nothing, until metaphor emerges and atmosphere materialises.

Shen divides the galleries into distinct zones, each with its own field of energy, weaving together the works of three artists into an intricate mesh of subtlety, meaning, and tension. In the main hall, He An’s Armenia stretches across the floor—named for a geopolitical threshold between East and West. In my eyes, it occupies a vanishing point beyond the horizon, a fleeting dream of icy remoteness and ascetic devotion. Here, Armenia becomes a geographical a priori of personal memory, identity, and border. Concrete pipes merge with bodily organs, fragmented and fused at the horizon, situated within a perspectival plane where ambiguity gestures towards distance, religion, and limit.

Mounted on the walls are Liu Jianhua’s Spine (silicone, newspaper ash, wire) and 1.2 Metres, a cascade of wire like a waterfall. Through material transformation, Liu unsettles the viewer’s perception of the real. Alongside Wang Sishun’s patinated stone series Apocalypse, Shen orchestrates a space where quietude and gravity coexist with elegance and danger, disturbing balance. Exiting the main hall, the installation opens into clarity: Liu’s Square, dispersed across the floor, disrupts the regimented formations familiar from the Venice Biennale. Responding to natural light and echoing He An’s Armenia, these elements resemble floating duckweed around small bridges, while Wang’s Apocalypse functions like a pavilion. His The End of 2012, inspired by the ice-crack lattice of Chinese garden windows, joins the ensemble, generating a fluid, joyful atmosphere.

If the first galleries resembled strolling past bridges and flowing water, the final hall immerses us in a pond. Works such as A Unified Core, Apocalypse, and Square metamorphose into schools of fish, bulrushes, and water hyacinths. At the most basic level, they kindle pure imagination, prompting us to question the meaning of our encounter with this garden space, and indeed our place within it. This rupture between “seeing,” “sensing,” and “becoming” is at the heart of recent landscape-art practices, demanding interpretation through a supra-sensory mode. From the perspective of aesthetic experience, I would argue that if a work is to leave a lasting imprint on the psyche—beyond fleeting retinal impact—the artist must position their vision at a vantage higher and grander than the sculptural object itself.

As landscape, art can assume many forms, but most are large-scale, even monumental. He An’s new work Love and Rockets—named after the rock band—was inspired by a puddle outside a sculpture factory, heart-shaped when inverted. With a diameter of 2.5 metres, it looms like an extraterrestrial object or an enlarged astronaut’s helmet. Yet to claim that “bigger is better” would be to misread He An. What drives him is not sheer scale but an obsession with industrial materials—steel, cement—and the textual interpretations bound to his own urban experience. He once described his work succinctly as “the hypertext of Third World slums.”

Wang Sishun’s Apocalypse series may lack the monumentality of other works in the exhibition, yet it offers an environment that is captivating, interactive, and destabilising. “Apocalypse,” in biblical terms, refers to divine self-revelation through creation, history, and conscience. Collecting stones that resemble portraits, Wang assembles presences that seem drawn from different worlds, peoples, identities, histories, and futures. Sacred and profane, noble and grotesque, these stones collide and converge. Scattered throughout the gallery, processed or raw, they materialise a concentrated display of identity-in-existence.

By the end of the exhibition, one finds no literal gardens—yet the atmosphere of the garden permeates throughout. This has always been Shen Ruiyun’s starting point since her first “garden project” in 2015: “I do not seek to replicate a modern garden,” she notes, “but to take the garden as a point of entry for identifying the traits of Chinese culture, and then translate these traits into works and exhibitions. What interests me is how to bring together artists and works of diverse types and temperaments, forming a coherent whole, cultivating atmosphere.”

The exhibition is spectacular: it shifts, it illuminates, it astonishes; it surrounds, consumes, and humbles us. We willingly yield to its seductions—entranced, overwhelmed by grandeur, value, ambition, and splendour. We long to propel such works further, to extend them with the artists—to multiply, to magnify, to maximise.