This exhibition, titled “Self-Topography”, presents the collective outcome of long-term projects carried out by artists in different geographical terrains. Curator Wang Che, together with the participating artists, have journeyed through the Nujiang and Minjiang Rivers in the Hengduan Mountains, the Yanshan range, the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the Kubuqi Desert, the black Gobi of Qinghai, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, as well as the regions of Fujian, Suichang in Zhejiang, and Xinjiang. Treating these geographies as both context and catalyst, the exhibition transforms the Guangdong Times Museum is reconfigured into a topographic visual field that brings together sixteen artists whose work stems from creative encounters with eight landforms–mountains, rivers, grasslands, gobi, plateaus, deserts, basins, and coasts.
The movements, perceptions, and creations that take place between self-opening and self-establishing form the overall gesture of the exhibition. On the one hand, the exhibition reflects the artists’ experiences of diversity and vitality across different terrains, aiming to awaken an awareness of how secondhand cognition and singular evaluative thinking limit perception, while also cultivating an openness to the natural, cultural, and historical contexts of various landscapes. On the other hand, it traces how these varied visual and bodily experiences become internalized into each artist’s individual artistic languages and stances.
“Self-Topography” is thus both a journey toward the land and a process of affirming the self—a movement that departs from the art center only to return with renewed understanding. Viewing and interpreting China’s diverse landforms offer multiple entry points into the artists’ creative vocabularies. Each artist emerges from a specific geomorphic environment, and each work carries the geography of its making. From these lands arise not only myriad forms of life but also the wisdom and intuition that sustain art itself—sensitivity, spirituality, and the impulse toward creation.