2014
2014
The mines where Iphones are born, where the 95% of today’s technology is created are dug in China, mostly concentrated in Jiangxi, an area rich in rare earth. In the hidden scene, deep in the mountain in Ganzhou, farmers turn into illegal miners, shifting their land from agriculture into scared land by a strange market called “mountain speculation”.
Leaving behind colourful tailing ponds, an abstract Toxic Sublime is formed.
The project is presented as an exhibition which reflects upon the shifts from the idyllic setting of nature; From the wilderness to 20th century abstract impressionist painting to this new type of nature of today -the landscape of our consumerism.
The images are read as a timeline of formation and decay, blurring the divisions between industrial production and the pursuit of pleasure.
The artificiality of the scene as an image is perceived through a composition of an infinite threatening vista, placing the viewer as curator of this landscape, which is changing across a human lifetime.
Through the shift from the actual into its performing act, context is lost and a portable surface is generated, like a painting in a white cube museum.
The image becomes “heterotopia” , an allegory to critical culture, a poisoned sublime.
2018
2020
2034
2014
2020
2026
2034
TOXIC SUBLIME
The Exhibiton_ The Artist Miner_ The Art Critic
The project is seen through the eyes of the miner who is being reimagined as a land artist and a future art critic who is analysing us and how this work of art was forming.