Casa Asia and the Real Jardín Botánico (RJB) of the Superior Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) present from tomorrow Saturday at 12 o’clock until next 11 May the exhibition project The culture of the landscape: The mountain, the tree and the river. Derivations of the contemporary natural and urban landscape, between utopia and dystopia.
This exhibition brings together for the first time works by 25 contemporary Asian and Spanish artists, whose common thread is their personal interpretation of landscape, expressed through five formats: drawing, painting, photography, video and installation.
This exhibition project, which can be visited in the Villanueva Pavilion of the RJB-CSIC, proposes a journey through the representation of landscape in contemporary art with a proposal that goes beyond the mere consumption of images. The sample raises essential questions about the relationship of humans with their environment and responsible participation in the preservation of the planet.
In China, the idea of landscape (shanshui) -which unites mountain (shan) and water (shui)-arose much earlier than in the West. Since the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1129) dynasties, painting and poetry have conceived of the landscape as a spiritual and philosophical manifestation, where the human being merges with the Tao and cosmic nature. But today, the interpretation of landscape in both East and West has experienced shifts in theory and practice that have contributed to its hybridization.
In the West, the landscape began to consolidate as a pictorial genre in the seventeenth century, but reached its peak in the nineteenth with Romanticism and Impressionism. Beyond representing a territory, the landscape became a space of emotional and symbolic expression. This dialogue between tradition and modernity, between East and West, as well as the semiotic hybridization of the corresponding images, is the core of Landscape culture.
The International Fair of Contemporary Art, ARCO, which is held at IFEMA Madrid from 5 to 9 March, includes this project among its proposal for visits to exhibitions during the fair.
