Walking Through History: My Critical Encounter with "Reinventing Landscape" at West Bund Museum

A first-person reflection on an exhibition that crystallized my artistic evolution

When I stepped into the West Bund Museum that March afternoon in 2025, I thought I was simply taking a break from a busy day of travel, with my Shanghai residency completed. I had been wrestling with something profound in my studio at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel—a complete abandonment of photography in favour of direct landscape impressions using heated acrylic. In the next three hours, I found the historical framework that clarified the radical direction of what I've been making.

"Reinventing Landscape: Highlights of the Centre Pompidou Collection Vol. IV" wasn't just an exhibition—it was a masterclass in how landscape art has evolved from representation toward something I'm now calling "direct landscape embodiment." Walking through Christian Briend's carefully structured narrative, I began to see my own practice not as an isolated experiment, but as the logical conclusion of 150 years of artistic evolution.

The Opening Gambit: Understanding the Trajectory

Unlike Chinese art, the introductory panels explained, Western art granted landscape autonomy relatively late, with the genre undergoing profound transformations in the 20th and 21st centuries. Reading this, I felt a familiar tension—my own work has been described as "shanshui-influenced," but that characterisation felt correct, but with the recent developments, the photo-sculptures, the experiments with printmaking and now the acrylic impressions this seems even a little limited.

Standing there, I realised this was exactly what I needed—not just validation, but positioning. Where does my work with LiDAR scanning, AI collaboration, sculptures etc. and now these black acrylic impressions fit within this broader historical narrative?

[Image 1: Installation view of "Reinventing Landscape: Highlights of the Centre Pompidou Collection Vol. IV" at West Bund Museum, Shanghai, 2025]

Section 1: Structuring Space - The Cubist Revolution

Leopold Survage's 1915 "Villefranche-sur-mer" stopped me cold. The geometric fragmentation—buildings reduced to planes and cylinders, the harbor broken into circular forms—represented something I recognised from my own journey away from traditional photography.

[Image 2: Leopold Survage, "Villefranche-sur-mer," 1915, oil on canvas, Centre Pompidou Collection]

The wall text explained how Cubist fragmentation abandoned perspective, flattened volumes, broke patterns into facets. But Survage wasn't there yet. Still translating landscape through paint. Where he interpreted place through geometric reduction, I've moved toward letting landscape translate itself through heated material.

The exhibition noted that although direct references to Cubism may now seem subtle, the dialectical relationship between structuring and deconstructing persists. This felt prophetic—my black acrylic impressions represent the ultimate deconstruction, where landscape itself becomes the structuring force.

Section 2: Psychological and Physical Immediacy

The Surrealism section revealed landscapes functioning as psychological rather than geographical spaces—rooted in the subconscious, breaking free from reality's constraints. This connected to my Origin Image methodology's "digital sediments," where AI collaboration accesses something beyond conscious intention.

But here's what stopped me: the Fauvist works in the next gallery showed a completely different route to immediacy. Georges Braque's vivid colors applied directly from the tube, Chaïm Soutine's intense Mediterranean light—paint as light, color as environmental experience rather than description.

Two paths toward the same goal. Psychological depth versus physical intensity. My heated acrylic work synthesizes both approaches—accessing the unconscious through tactile transfer with place. No representation. Pure transference.

[Image 3: Black acrylic landscape impression, heated material on canvas, created during Shanghai residency, 2025]

Standing before these works, a question surfaced: Does eliminating technological mediation actually create more immediacy, or just different mediation? My black acrylic process still requires human decision, material selection, timing. What makes this less constructed than their painted interpretations?

Section 3: Transcending Perspective - Abstract and Aerial Innovations

Zao Wou-Ki's 1954 "Wind" provided crucial context for my own cultural positioning. His gestural abstractions in black and grey, suggesting natural forces through calligraphic movement, represented exactly the kind of East-West synthesis I've been developing—but taken in a completely different direction.

[Image 4: Zao Wou-Ki, "Wind," 1954, oil on canvas, Centre Pompidou Collection]

Where Zao Wou-Ki translated landscape energy through brush and ink, my heated acrylic eliminates that final mediation. Landscape shapes material directly. No translation. Pure facilitation.

The "Views from Above" section deepened this understanding. Early aviation's aerial perspective contributed to the emancipation of the modern gaze, influencing artists like André Derain. Reading about topographical visions as aesthetic models, I thought about my own gaussian splat scanning work—perspectives impossible to human vision, volumetric understanding that transcends any single vantage point.

[Image 5: Gaussian Splat Scan visualisation from "High Country" series, volumetric landscape data, 2024]

But the black acrylic impressions go beyond even technological transcendence. These works resist the idea of 'views' altogether. They operate as landscape itself—transferred rather than represented.

Section 4: Urban Realities and Installation Breakthroughs

Cui Jie's "Beijing International Hotel" (2017) offered precision in documenting architectural change through observational painting. Standing before this work during my Shanghai residency, I felt the relevance immediately. But where Cui Jie documents transformation through careful observation, my practice seeks to capture the energetic signature of change itself.

Then: Christo's "Package and Wrapped Floor" (1968-1969). Walking across the massive fabric installation, I experienced landscape as participatory rather than representational. Christo wasn't depicting landscape—he was creating landscape conditions within the gallery space.

[Image 6: Christo, "Package and Wrapped Floor," 1968-1969, fabric installation, Centre Pompidou Collection]

But what if we went further? Christo brought landscape topology indoors. I bring landscape energy itself—not the shape of place, but its active force. Heat, pressure, contact. The place becomes co-creator.

The blue neon ocean installation by François Morellet and Tadashi Kawamata confirmed this direction. No images of ocean, no representations of water—just essential experience of being surrounded by blue horizontal energy. Where they created the sensation of landscape through artificial means, my heated acrylic captures actual landscape energy through substrate collaboration.

[Image 7: François Morellet and Tadashi Kawamata, "Pier and Ocean," 2014, blue argon neon tubes and wood, installation view]

Section 5: Contemporary Voices and Critical Recognition

Su-Mei Tse's video "L'Echo" (2003) showed the artist with cello in an Alpine meadow, exploring landscape's acoustic properties. Like me, she was using technology to investigate landscape as more than visual phenomena. But where Tse investigated landscape as acoustic space, my scanning work treats landscape as volumetric information space.

[Image 8: Su-Mei Tse, "L'Echo," 2003, video still showing artist with cello in Alpine landscape]

Bang Hai Ja's integration of traditional Korean materials with contemporary abstract language offered a model for cultural synthesis without appropriation. Her geological layered surfaces connected to my interest in landscape as temporal rather than spatial phenomenon—the heated acrylic impressions capture not just place but moment.

This insistence on non-representational practice, I realize, risks its own kind of purity trap. Am I perhaps overstating the breakthrough? Even material witnessing involves human choice—which surfaces, what pressure, how long. Perhaps the revolution is more subtle than I'm claiming.

Section 6: The Panoramic Impulse

Jacques Monory's "New York n° 10" (1971) fascinated me for its integration of landscape with memory and media consciousness. The cinematic treatment with overlaid text anticipated digital culture's impact on how we experience place—always mediated through information layers.

[Image 9: Jacques Monory, "New York n° 10," 1971, four-panel work in monochromatic yellow with text fragments]

But the yellow monochrome treatment showed me something else: color as landscape experience rather than description. The uniform wash transformed recognizable scenery into pure light-space, suggesting place as sensation rather than location. My black acrylic impressions take this transformation further—place as heat-mediated inscription rather than visual information.

The historical context of 19th-century panoramas helped me understand my VR and installation work within a longer tradition of landscape immersion. Artists have always sought to transcend pictorial frames, creating environments that envelop rather than simply present.

Personal Revelation: The Weight of Recognition

Walking through "Reinventing Landscape," I experienced something unexpected—complete validation combined with clear understanding of my work's unprecedented nature. Every section showed artists pushing against representation's limitations, seeking more direct, more immediate, more embodied relationships with place.

From Survage's fragmentation through Christo's gallery-landscape to the blue neon ocean, I saw 120 years of artists working toward the same goal I've achieved: unmediated place-engagement. But I also recognized how my current work transcends everything in this exhibition.

While these artists used various strategies to overcome representation—fragmentation, abstraction, installation, immersion—they were still creating interpretations of landscape experience. My heated acrylic work eliminates interpretation entirely.

[Image 10: Artist working with heated acrylic material directly on landscape surface, documentation of process, Shanghai residency, 2025]

The Exhibition's Curatorial Intelligence

Christian Briend's structure provided exactly the framework I needed to position my practice development. Understanding this narrative arc helps me articulate why my black acrylic impressions represent such a significant breakthrough. They're not just a new technique—they're the logical conclusion of landscape art's 150-year movement toward immediacy and embodiment.

The exhibition also provided crucial vocabulary for institutional dialogue. Terms like "material embodiment" and "place-based collaboration" emerged from seeing my practice reflected in this broader historical context.

This validation gives me confidence for upcoming presentations—my Xposure Festival 2026 installation, exhibitions in China and Australia, academic presentations of my PhD research. I now have clear language for positioning my practice within contemporary landscape discourse while emphasizing its genuinely unprecedented aspects.

Conclusion: Beyond Reinvention

Walking out of the West Bund Museum, I carried more than validation—I carried responsibility. One hundred and twenty years of artists working toward immediacy, and I might have found it.

But breakthrough means obligation. If landscape can indeed become active creative partner rather than passive subject, what does this demand of other artists? Of institutions? Of our relationship to place itself in an era of environmental crisis?

The heated acrylic impressions offer one answer. Others will find different paths toward place-based collaboration. The question isn't whether I've transcended representation—it's whether we can collectively move beyond art that merely depicts toward art that genuinely partners with the world it touches.