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Sifang Art Museum is pleased to announce its next exhibition: “Mountain Sites: Views of Laoshan”, on view from June 5th to October 5th 2016.

What is the shape of a mountain? Is it the meandering path one walks through, or the contour of a mountain range seen from far away? Is it the jagged geometry of a stone quarry, or the amorphous blue of a flowing stream? Is the color of a mountain the green foliage seen from a distance or the umber earth underneath ones feet? How does one describe a mountain, and how does one begin to understand one?

If topography is the practice of describing a particular place, the origins of the word signifying that we write or draw a locality, then “Mountain Sites: Views of Laoshan” is an attempt to provide different perspectives of what a mountain is while reimagining what it also can be. Setting our eyes on the existing context of Laoshan Mountain Range, where Sifang Art Museum is located, we invited more than 20 Chinese-speaking artists to explore and articulate their unique view of the mountain. Over the course of a year, the museum curatorial team carried out ground research work while all artists were invited for multiple site visits, which aided in the conceptualization of their final projects. Some chose a slower, sedimentary process, as several of the artists decided to take month-long residencies within Laoshan to become totally immersed in the mountain and the locale.

Ultimately, each artist chose a specific site in Laoshan—inside the museum, within a bamboo grove, on a lake, in a village, by a historical ruin, near an abandoned open-pit mine—and developed a site-specific project in which they inscribed themselves into the structural, historical, and social contexts of the local area.

As the second installment of the Museum’s ongoing series of exhibitions titled: “Topographies”, we chose to explore our relationship to the land literally surrounding us, where nature, history, and modernity compress and merge to form a unique geo-cultural landscape. By pushing past the boundary of the traditional museum, we intend to spur a conversation with a vaster geography and a broader vista. We hope that during your visit, you will not only enjoy the various projects realized by the artists, but also the process of finding ones own conception of the mountain.