Me, Nature, As One: Victoria Yau, Zhang Yu, Stella Zhang, Meng Huang, Xu Hongming, Jiang Heng, and Chu Chu.
Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to present Me, Nature, As One, a group exhibition of seven Chinese artists spanning multiple generations whose work traces the evolution and reimagining of shanshui, the classical tradition of Chinese landscape painting. Across ink, watercolor, photography, mixed media, and calligraphy, the exhibition presents work that imbues nature with spirituality, internal landscapes, and existential philosophy.
Shanshui, literally “mountain and water,” has never been about depicting nature alone. For centuries, it has sought nature’s spiritual essence and asked a broader question about humanity’s place within it. The artists in Me, Nature, As One reinterpret the classical form while keeping that inquiry alive, guided by the idea that self and nature are not separate but shape one another through subjective experience.
The exhibition takes its lead from the late Victoria Yau, who treated landscape as an extension of herself and called her paintings “the daughters I never had.” One such daughter, Grand Canyon 5:00 PM, uses layered watercolor collage not merely to capture the rock’s texture but to convey its depth and quiet permanence. With great restraint and precision, Yau blended ink and watercolor traditions with abstract expressionism, rendering land, sky, and sea as inseparable from her own perception.
In Stella Zhang’s work, the line between topographical and psychological landscape grows especially pronounced. Her semi-monochromatic works draw on black-and-white photographs of mountain terrain, weathered boulders, and craggy stone. Woven into their curves and sharp angles is the psychological and sensory experience of being a woman: its pervasive stress and bodily contortion.
Chu Chu likewise questions the boundary between nature and its representation. Combining photography, mixed media, crystalline forms, and calligraphy, she reconstructs images of the natural world through layering, revealing nature as something mediated by memory, culture, and perception.
In Jiang Heng’s Falling Flowers series, torn fragments of brightly colored rice paper printed with news drift against dark grounds like falling petals. Nature’s fleeting beauty becomes a meditation on time, transience, and the impermanence of contemporary life.
Xu Hongming’s luminous, cloud-like images return to the truth-seeking origins of shanshui, before literati convention hardened it into a restrictive practice. Joining that early spirit with elements of Western abstraction, he describes his work as “trying to envision the wholeness of the universe, of the matter that is ever-present, if not readily visible.”
Zhang Yu makes ink itself the site of experiment and theory, departing from both literati painting and modern abstraction. In his Divine Light series, textured, rock-like forms eclipse a bright, transcendent light, suggesting an infinitude surrounding objects of unknown mass, origin, and meaning.
Across the exhibition, shanshui is reimagined through abstraction, material experimentation, and introspection. Together, these artists show that abstraction does not remove us from nature. Rather, it offers a way to meet nature’s complexity and reconsider our place within it.
