Madrid,
I put on my head down and then I began to be born leaves in my body and also came out roots of my hands and the roots were put under the earth more and more and more.
The protagonist of The vegetarianHan Kang’s crudest novel, the last Nobel Prize for Literature, stars a young housewife, Yeong – Hye, who does not want to continue alive but surrender to nature, merge with her, and with that goal – the one to become a tree – stops eating. Putting head down is how it began to proof of that transition that would lead it from one unhappy life to another, at least, rooted.
That story, that many met after its author was awarded the Swedish Prize, but dating from 2007, has been the starting point of the exhibition “The Culture of the Landscape. The mountain, the tree and the river”, which Menene Gras has commissioned and that can be visited in the Villanueva Pavilion of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, a center that organizes it next to Casa Asia; But so are the natures present in the painting and the poetry of the Chinese Tang (618-907 AD) and Song (960-1129 d. C.), which have actually had an extensive influence in the gaze towards landscapes and stations, both in literature and in the arts, to this day. And that influence is linked to the spiritual: the aesthetic contemplation of the environment in the Chinese tradition seems religious and mystical considerations, when the landscape is conceived as the union of individuals and Tao, the latter being the center of which all beings arise, the cosmic place that explains that being human and nature cannot be disconnected.
His conception of nature, on the other hand, will have as fundamental elements mountain and water; the first as axis of the world, space in which the sovereign and the wise bind to the Tao; The second for its innumerable benefits: it is worshiped in Chinese culture. One and the other also make up the Chinese term for landscape: Shanshuiand Hua San Shui Xuby Zong Bin, was the first treaty on painting of this genre.
This exhibition is part of works of more than twenty Spanish and Asian artists, whose generation Kawakami, Koo Bohchang, Timothy Hyunsoo Lee, Mateo Maté, Fina Miralles, San Moix, Marina Núñez, Kei Takemura, Michiko Totoki, Ulysss3s, Xin Liu, Yang Yongliang, Yuan Goang Ming and Zhang Kechun. These are drawings, photographs, videos, paintings and facilities that represent both natural and urban landscapes, or their bordering land, with or without human figures: they have not wanted to eliminate the architectures of the sample approach so as not to lose sight of the fact that, in our time, one and the other are inseparable and, in their artistic plasma, they come to represent the possible consequences of our ways of inhabiting and working. utopias of a future that usually contemplates from the parameters of the crisis.
The landscape today, comes to emphasize the exhibition, is not such a called object because it receives our gaze, but rather a place of interaction and exploration that also seems, must be managed, far from the romantic consideration of natures in which to be able to project ourselves or which to link our moods. A usual aspect of these works has to do, in that sense, with the ecology and awareness of the environment itself, with which, despite treating from the industrial revolution to distance ourselves, we do not stop storing an existential relationship, which we maintain with the spaces we inhabit.
The ultimate purpose of this exhibition is to echo those ties that the contemporary individual keeps with his surroundings, considered as a more and less ingredient of his sociability, through representative pieces (among many possible) of that group of artists: fictional reproductions of spaces and times of always real, however imaginary that some may result. Of environments of which we are part, even if we do not aspire to the communion of Yeong -Hye.
“The landscape culture: the mountain, the tree and the river”
Real Botanical Garden. Villanueva Pavilion
Murillo Square, 2
Madrid
From March 8 to May 11, 2025
