Pavilion Review: "Shanshui: Echoes & Signals" at Hong Kong's M+ Museum
by Emma-Lee Moss
Relatum - the Mirror Road (2021/2024) | Lee Ufan | natural materials and glass
There was a mobile phone from 1989 on display in Shanshui: Echoes and Signals, M+ museum’s exhibition relating to East Asian landscape painting, which opened last year and will run for two years.
Radio Nurse and Guardian Ear (1937; Bakelite, enamelled steel, and electrical) | Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988, United States) Zenith Radio Corporation (Now LG Electronics).
The phone was bulky and grey, its technology so many times updated that the eye couldn’t quite place it. It sat in a plexiglass case, the index card beside it naming the designer and manufacturing company side by side as co-authors.
In the previous rooms, two Bakelite radios from the early days of that technology were displayed in the same fashion. These everyday objects had been brought sparingly into the exhibition, representatives from the world of design, to consider how the traditional subjects of shanshui - literally “mountains, water” - are today connected to our technologies, through the materials that are mined from them, often to the point of scarcity.
This was one of the ways the M+ curatorial team sought to “reimagine” shanshui, the millennia-old tradition of Chinese landscape painting. The exhibition bills itself as a dialogue between shanshui tradition and contemporary artists working across forms. Through the exhibit’s nine rooms, it was approached and expanded from all angles, offering no historical context, rather than invitations to enter the “poetic imagination” of the form.
To move through the exhibit was to enter a mood of shanshui. In the first room, expansion on theme grouped a collection of works on paper and sculpture. Chua Chye Teck’s Scholar’s Rocks offered the most obvious tribute. Chunks of rock-like concrete from stood in a row, displayed on wooden stands like gongshi, or mysterious stones. The artist, wanting to view Chinese culture from the “diluted” perspective of his home in Singapore, collected the concrete from construction sites, which was apt for a de-construction of the subject matter.
Nearby, a series of Xu Bing works on paper featured the mountainscapes of the Himalayas depicted not in image but as a series of descriptive words, so that the depiction formed in the imagination of the viewer. Made during his participation on the “Himalaya Project”, the artist described the process thus: “I sit in the mountain, facing the real mountain and write down the mountain”. In the case of Chinese characters, he is also drawing the mountain.
Landscript sketch in the Himalayas-English translation of the Chinese characters (1999) | Xu Bing | Inkjet print on paper (facsimile), inkjet print on translucent tracing paper
Untitled (1969) | Zou Wou-Ki | Etching with aquatint
Entering the space of the exhibit could parallel a journey through mountain paths, experienced by hermits and sages. At the starting point, works in ink on paper provided a grounding, as the exhibit gradually rose in pitch to sound, video and largescale installations. The closest “echo” of shanshui might have been in etchings by Zou Wou-Ki, born in 1920, whose work was often viewed through a Western lens, but nonetheless drew profoundly from Chinese landscape painting.
The path became real at the point of “Relatum - the Mirror Road”, by Korean artist Lee Ufan. The viewer was invited to walk a reflective surface, bisecting a bed of small stones that crunched underfoot. Outside, the busy West Kowloon construction site hummed with activity, offering a visual counterpart, as your mind slowed down, to the world you were slowing from. There was a view, too, to the Palace Museum, holding examples through history of Chinese landscape paintings in the shanshui tradition.
Two standout works from the exhibit were paintings by Hong-Kong-based ink artists. Wucius Wong’s Sky-land Expression no. 15 and Wai Pong Yu’s A Rhythm of Landscape both mused on subject matter through wave-like strokes that, in the case of Wong, mimicked mountainscapes. The work of both of these ink artists could be described as a lifelong musing on the exhibition’s theme, working with the abstraction inherent in shanshui tradition, which was also a process of inner development through brushwork.
Excerpts from IIllustration Book of Natural Form (2017) | Guo Hongwei | Watercolour on paper
To highlight the ink paintings for their simple pleasures is not to dismiss work on other scales. There are almost one-hundred-and-forty pieces in the exhibit, which will rotate over the period of its public view. It was a thorough and satisfying offering, during which you were invited to constellate on realms of understanding, entering a meditative state. The roots of Daoist shanshui practice, and the function of mountains as the realm of immortals, were examined in the room titled “Between Worlds”. Here a documentary by Taiwanese artist Chang Chao-Tang depicted the ritual of a boat burning festival, which takes place every three years in the village of Sucuo Village in Tainan. The film is shot by Wong Kar Wai’s cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. Beside it, radio technology was highlighted again in its early function to communicate with spirits.
Viewing a landscape painting, one becomes immersed in the subject matter. Many perspective are used in shanshui, so that timelessness is part of the experience. Time, then was an apt subject in a room where a dark wall flashed with red numbers, which updated constantly to represent a period of timelessness spent by the artist when convalescing from an illness. This was “Region No. 43701- No. 43900” (1998) by Miyajima Tetsuo. Beside it, Stanley Wong’s flip clock showed only the time as “N:OW”. These pieces were a representation, respectively, of the endless cycles of life and death, and the impossibility of a time outside of the present.
Still from The Boat Burning Festival (1979) | Chang Chao-Tang with Christopher Doyle | Video
In today’s society, we can feel alienated from the natural world, a distorted perception of humanity as somehow separate from mountains and water. A final note from the exhibition, as you prepared to enter the bright corridors of the museum, reminded you to consider the mountains and water of Hong Kong, the busy modern city in which the elegantly designed M+ is only one of many recent new architectural landmarks.
Hong Kong, of course, is also a series of islands set around a well-sheltered harbour. From the windows of M+, one glimpsed the literal Peak at the centre of Hong Kong Island, which faces the Lion Rock Mountain, with its craggy, feline surface.
Architectural model for the West Kowloon Cultural District
It was true, as we left by car and tried to navigate the complex road system out of the museum district, thoughts of the natural world receded. But, there are ways of reminding. For me, this practice is through listening. Today, listening is often suggested as one sensory route to mindfulness, but, for our forest-dwelling ancestors, listening was essential; mindfulness was survival, and humans and the forest were one.
Still from 47 Days, Sound-less (2024) | Nguyen Thrinh Thi | Video
I thought of this while standing in a room with Nguyen Trinh Thi’s 47 Days, Sound-less, commissioned in part by M+ in 2024, and featuring two video broadcasts, as well as screens relaying projections from the ceiling. Samples of sound and image were collaged from footage of the natural world in Hollywood and Vietnamese films, a comment on post-colonial power structures. Sampled dialogue fell into a narrative, sometimes seemingly spoken from the point of view of forest dwellers, describing an encounter with us, the people of today. At a certain point, both films cut into darkness, and the room was filled with omnidirectional forest sounds. It was moving, a reminder to stop sometimes, and be prepared not just to experience landscape, but be part of it.
View from within the Shanshui: Echoes and Signals exhibition, looking out to West Kowloon Cultural District (Palace Museum on right)
Shanshui: Echoes and Signals runs at Hong Kong’s M+ Museum until February 2026
Examples of Lui Shuo-Kwan’s landscape paintings in Hong Kong can be found in this Pavilion article about his work