Schizophrenia and Landscape: From Past to Future

Lo Ch'ing explains that, in the (post)modern world we live in, 

Within 12 hours, you can experience this atmosphere like that of the Song Dynasty or Tang Dynasty and within the next 12 hours you are in the modern world, in a very small room…but you can open the window, and then again you see a very classical landscape with the drama of the peaks and mist outside. I think if I can record that faithfully, my landscape is not only the portrait of myself, but also the portrait of my time.[1]

This spatial and temporal rupture is, he says, a schizophrenic one—and yet this schizophrenia can be navigated by those who cultivate an understanding both of the past and its tradition and of the vagaries of the present. Lo describes his art in relation to the experience of travelling through time, experiencing landscapes as painters first experienced them during the Song or Tang Dynasties. If Lo's art can transport us into the past, it also forces us to think about the future, to take responsibility for the global conditions of the Anthropocene and imagine changes and solutions to its problems.           

The works included in this portion of the exhibition raise questions about how we can think, live, and act in the schizophrenic Anthropocene—but just as importantly, they remind us of the animals and plants with whom we share the world. Pandas, palm trees, persimmons: they all grow and produce their own structures of meaning in dialogue with our own, and our fate is fundamentally tied to theirs. Before we can think the future, we must fully imagine the present, and to occupy the present we must understand our past: Lo Ch'ing's poem-paintings, merging philosophies and aesthetics from across the globe and dissolving dualities of East and West, help us do just this. 

A PDF of this essay is avaliable here.