Abstract
This practice-based artistic research employs diagnostic methods of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)- “Watching, Listening, Asking, and Feeling”- to represent artificially manufactured landscapes. By applying multi-sensory perspectives of “seeing” , this project creates a new terminology ‘Humanscape’ and tries to represent it through photographic language with my “earth writing” experiences inspired by geopoetics studies. Rather than asserting the lands are “sick”, it illuminates how nature and ‘Humanscape’ permeate and disrupt each other, exploring the potential openness of the habitable land and wilderness. The whole exploration is rooted in my intimate and intuitive walks in reclaimed landscapes from the sea in my homecity in China. The artworks focus on the tensioned boundary and dynamic balance between ‘Humanscape’ and deserts, mountains, and sea. Through intervening in humanly regulated environments, this project depicts landscapes with aerial photography and collage, electron scanning, moving images, cyanotype prints, and sounds. Replying to the open call, this project experiments with innovative methodological framework and the terminology in depicting and representing specific landscapes I encountered in the contemporary society. My personal walking and human gaze into the landscape examine how individual experiences orient photographic practice for me as a wanderer, researcher, and artist. By using a variety of images, I also approach and investigate boundaries of visual language in deciphering the landscape visually, verbally, and even emotionally.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
LANDSCAPE, PLACE, ENVIRONMENT, PHOTOGRAPHY, IMAGE, PRACTICE, WALKING, VISUAL, REPRESENTATION, PERSPECTIVE
