Author: Jiayan Liu

 
Developed in the pre-modern era, Shanshu–i literally means mountains and water– has now become a symbol of Chinese culture.

However, Moving away from the original content and form of pre-modern Chinese landscape paintings, a lot of new media artists appropriations of shanshui tend to focus on the appealing visuals and immersive experience. Thus, the spirits of shanshui behind those visuals are lost. My project“Reconstructing Shanshui” hence, is a video installation that channels the shanshui form with its spiritual connections by bringing two man-made nature together–the screen-based landscape imagery and the artificial garden. In doing so, this project offers audiences a way to rethink new-media shanshui art and its relation to nature in contemporary contexts.

In the first scene, the visuals change from real landscapes to ink and brushes. The final ink and brush scene is generated by a touch designer based on the real landscape video input. I liquified the real landscape to restore the Chinese ink and brush painting effect because pre-modern Shanshui painting is the source for all the appropriations of visual motifs and aesthetics. I want to show the changing process of Chinese landscape paintings are developed from real nature, the mountains and waters. In terms of the settings, I project the visuals onto the window, with the silhouette of real plants, the juxtaposition gives the sense of entering a trance and poses a set of contrasts — tradition and technology, digital and natural, lights and shadows.

In the second scene, I present what I consider a typical digital-rendered mountain visuals onto a water tank hidden among plants, with water dripping into the tank, creating both a rippling effect and aquatic soundscape.

In both scenes, I present the screen-based landscape visuals in an artificially composed garden setting. As a whole, my project creates an interwoven sense of physical/digital, realism/illusionism, which pushes us to rethink how new media art can both inherit and enhance the shanshui as a form, but at the same time rebuild its connection to various forms of “nature” in contemporary times.