The walls of the “Mountain Room” in “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty: Concept and Design by Robert Wilson,” covered with Yang Yongliang’s landscapes.
My favorite room in “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty: Concept and Design by Robert Wilson” is the ninth room—technically Gallery 274, though I more affectionately refer to it as the Mountain Room. The theme of this gallery is the love of mountains shared by Chinese emperors and court officials, an almost romanticized view of mountainscapes as a space of tranquility and spiritual harmony. The objects in the room were installed with such invisible means that they appear to float, and the exciting lighting and sound changes help energize the space. But I linger in this gallery not because of what’s between the walls but the walls themselves, wrapped entirely with the work of contemporary Chinese artist Yang Yongliang.
Another view of the Mountain Room in “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty: Concept and Design by Robert Wilson” at Mia.
Several years ago, I researched and wrote about Yang’s practice for my Master’s thesis. His beguiling photo-collage prints, known as digital landscapes, draw on traditional Chinese landscape paintings, those familiar scenes of rocks, water, and trees in which the natural world is presented as relatively untouched and people are few and far between, depicted almost as dots on the landscape, increasing the sense of nature’s vastness. But Yang’s landscapes resemble these scenes only from afar. Up close, they are revealed as urban landscapes, composed of objects and scenes altered or made by the human hand. They do not highlight spiritual harmony, like the works of the old masters, instead mourning contemporary China’s loss of human-nature unity and raising awareness of the negative consequences of rapid urbanization.
Traditional Chinese landscape paintings were executed with an almost reverent respect for nature, and Yang’s shuma shanshui, or digital landscapes, uncannily mirror the tranquility and contemplative sensibility of these paintings. Shaded skyscrapers and buildings are layered to recreate the revered mountain. Dainty and diminutive construction cranes resemble the slight dots of paint that traditionally make up trees, rocks, and vegetation. It’s an “atmospheric” environment that speaks to the threat of smog and air pollution in Chinese cities, a way of demonstrating that the traditional human understandings of nature and the natural environment itself are in danger of being destroyed by China’s current goal of modernization through rapid urbanization.
A detail of one of Yang Yongliang’s photo collages, showing the skyscrapers and industry comprising the landscape.
I interviewed Yang in his Shanghai studio in 2015, when his work earned him a spot on the shortlist for the Prix Pictet, an international award for photography and sustainability. Shanghai is arguably ground zero in China’s unprecedented building boom, and in 2015 the Shanghai Tower was completed, the second-tallest skyscraper in the world. “I’m in despair at the rate of urbanization in China,” Yang told The Guardian then. “It’s like witnessing someone dying who you can’t help.”
Indeed, Yang’s works can be read as apocalyptic. But seeing his print in Power and Beauty was a truly transformative experience. Greatly enlarged from a print recently acquired by Mia, it allows for simultaneous investigation of the minute details and for feeling enveloped by the entirety. I almost feel a sense of hope when viewing this print—surrounded by objects originally created to celebrate nature and the mountainscape, I am hopeful that we can return to that admiration of the natural world again.
Top image: A scene from Yang Yongliang’s digital landscape recently acquired by Mia.