Artistic exploration examines importance of trees
An ongoing exhibition at the Power Station of Art has brought together artists, botanists and philosophers to tell about their bonds with trees, one of the oldest living organisms on the planet.
Trees, an exhibition jointly presented by PSA, Shanghai’s official museum of contemporary art, and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, runs from July 9 to Oct 10. It showcases more than 200 works by more than 30 artists that highlight the beauty and biological complexity of trees, while reminding the public about the environmental problems that pose a serious threat to their survival.
The exhibition first took place in Paris in 2019, and was one of the most popular shows at the Fondation Cartier, a private cultural institution founded in 1984.
Scientists found that trees and other plants have sensorial abilities, communication skills, memory capacity, symbiosis with other species and climatic influence, according to one of the curators of the show,
Bruce Albert, a French anthropologist who spoke to audiences in Shanghai via video conference at the exhibition’s opening on July 8.
Albert spent years in South America studying the indigenous Yanomami people, whose paintings illustrate the myths and daily life in the forest, and the relationship between plants and animals.
Also featured at the exhibition is landscaping designer Stefano Boeri. The Italian architect and urban planner in 2014 built the Vertical Forest, two residential towers with an ecosystem consisting of more than 700 trees and 20,000 plants in Milan. His work on an urban forest for Liuzhou of China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region is also on display. The exhibition shows a kinetic model that Boeri developed, which illustrates the different strategies of creating forest cities according to the different geological and climate conditions in China.
Chinese artists are also featured in the exhibition. Among them is Shanghai-based artist Zhang Enli, who started to create paintings of trees in 2004. Four of these creations, each measuring 3 meters wide and 2.5 meters high, are on display at the show.
To the 56-year-old, the four paintings of trees are like portraits of the elderly: The twisted trunks and branches without leaves seem to have personalities, with their life stories to tell.
Another artist whose works are on show is Hu Liu, a Beijing-based painter who mainly focuses on plants. The 39-year-old meticulously fills her illustrations of plants with black pencil shading. With complicated lines and strokes she constructs the spatial order of the subjects. While her imagery is accurate, the atmosphere is poetic, with a tint of mystery.
According to Gong Yan, director of PSA, this is the third time the station has joined hands with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. In 2019, the institutions presented Japanese architect Junya Ishigami’s first solo exhibition in China and held a showcase featuring works of art based on the architecture of Jean Nouvel.