3 Gardens – 三假山

Exhibited at Oil Street Art Space

May to October 2022

Three Gardens is a concept to articulate a new understanding of landscape within the manufactured realities of Hong Kong and within the global contemporary artifice we live. It is the title of three site-specific installations on the grounds of Oil Street Art Space, also known as Oi!. To understand the three works and the relations between them, we must see the works in the artistic lineage and context of Chinese gardens and landscape painting – both being constructed simulations of the actuality of the wild nature – a construct of reflection and adoration, danger and uncertainty.

 

Metamorph I

Metamorph II

Metamorph III

Metamorph IV

 

Throughout the development of Chinese landscape painting, the meaning of the depicted, and largely constructed landscape shifted from an early universal longing of cultivated men to escape their quotidian world to commune with nature, to a more sophisticated literati understanding of landscape as a metaphor for specific social, philosophical, or political convictions.The three gardens negotiate, extend, and evolve that notion of the constructed landscape – a combination of the two characters山水, mountain and water. The three gardens work through imitation, representation and transformation, gradually dissolving the perceived physicality of the landscape concept and the associated garden.

The second garden is an industrial garden made from laser-cut and acid etched steel plates. It is a resonating, ephemeral garden where sand is carried as liquid flowing in reverberating patterns. The second garden is called Cymatic Ground. Combining Art and Science in interdisciplinary collaboration, we created a sonic extension of the landscape as a liquid shapeless continuum, made visible through vibrations.

The work articulates the invisible frequencies within each material and shape, where energies brought into harmonies create overlaying vibration, agitation and movement. These natural frequencies show the interplay between geometry and sound.Like the coastal lines are slowly shaped by the energies carried by the waves of the ocean, the vibrations in the Cymatic Ground uncover the invisible patterns of energies flowing through the landscape.

Pocket Garden

The third garden is neither here nor there – it sits in between. It is based on physical elements yet itself is immaterial. It is playful and explorative, minimal and mathematical, digital and analogue, site-specific and independent. It is a technological garden – a simulation and at the same time a transformation.It is a software landscape in the form of an app that allows the audience to collect experiences from the previous gardens to create their own landscape.

 

We walk through the first garden and scan the space narrated through the Meta-morphs; we feel the vibrations of the Cymatic Ground and record the frequencies of the instrument. All input is transformed into vectors and attractors, virtual rocks and pebbles. Our experiences become invisible forces and their relation to each other in a system. They become the artificial mountains in an artificial garden (假山). The third garden is an arrangement of simulated force attractors that allows the visitor to create an infinite amount of reactive landscape systems. In some ways, the disillusion of the landscape being real and physical, is similar to the painting of it, where water and ink construct like pixels as ground for contemplation and reflection about one’sown position in such a constructed landscape.