Shanshui: Echoes and Signals

M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, is pleased to announce the opening of the new thematic exhibition Shanshui: Echoes and Signals to the public from Saturday, February 3, 2024 in the South Galleries of the museum. Drawn from the M+ Collections, this exhibition explores the complex connections between landscape and humanity in our post-industrial and increasingly virtual world. Rotating displays will periodically renew the dialogues among the works and with the natural and urban environments beyond the museum itself.  

Commonly translated as “landscape”, shanshui means literally “mountain and water.” Encompassing more than observable reality, the term refers to a cultural legacy integral to Chinese philosophical thinking and poetic imagination that has motivated a millennium-long tradition of ink painting across East Asia. Building on this legacy, Shanshui: Echoes and Signals reimagines landscape and our relationship to it through visual art, moving image, sound, design and architecture, and explores resonances not only between different genres and mediums but also between space and time, vision and imagination, fleeting experience and persistent history.  

The exhibition will showcase artistic and intellectual engagements with landscape as concept, theme, and matter by artists such as Guo Hongwei, Kan Tai-keung, Heidi Lau, Ana Mendieta, Wesley Tongson, Wucius Wong, Xu Bing, Yang Jiechang, and Zao Wou-Ki. The new landscapes of contemporary urban and digital worlds are evoked in an iconic LED installation by Miyajima Tatsuo, a selection of electronics from the museum’s design collection, and major video installations by Liu Chuang, Amar Kanwar, and Nguyen Trinh Thi. Other highlights include a sculpture garden featuring Isamu Noguchi’s galvanised steel sculptures, activated by a site-responsive sound installation by Vivian Wang.  

Over the course of its two-year-long run, Shanshui: Echoes and Signals will be punctuated by regular rotations of works by major international artists, architects, and moving image makers. A range of curatorial and public programmes as well as special moving image presentations at M+ Cinema will expand the exhibition’s speculative thinking and visceral experience beyond the galleries.