ABOVE mountain and sea

ABOVE mountain and sea, by interdisciplinary artist, film maker, HeMas Zhang, is a meditative and spiritual engagement with the Australian landscape. Hemas Zhang explores the relationship between human beings and nature through the experience of the passage of time.

This exhibition was developed during his residency at Sinofeild, a Blue Mountains retreat, enabled him to directly feel and observe the profoundly ancient landscapes of the Blue Mountains whilst experiencing the unique environment through the lense of conversations with Buddhist monks. His different cultural perspective, provides us with a different understanding of the awareness of the old history of this land, as his abstraction rises above the land with a topographical almost spiritual connection that allows him to touch this land lightly. In doing so he asks us to examine our relationship with this environment and reflect upon what is it that we actually see? And how we see? And what we see? when we connect with this place, with this continent and with this history.

Zhang acknowledges his influence by the Classics of Mountains and Seas, also known as Shanhai jing, a Chinese classical text from approximately 4th century BCE, which systematically and comprehensively records mythical geographical overviews of the Qin dynasty, whist providing future generations with information of the ecological environments, including mountains waterways, mineral, animal and plant distribution, recording climate changes, migration and information of ecological environments and human activities thousands of years ago. For Zhang, his art, like the Classic of mountains and Seas, is about a knowledge that travels through history, that is sensitive to the traces of life, and pays close attention to the consequences of humanity and the dialogues of history and human destiny and salvation.

In his topographical reflections, Zhang almost philosophically creates an art that almost minimally interferes with the environment by utilizing materials such as earth, ash embers and tiny pebbles, to create his almost monochrome abstract paintings of his experience with the land, as well as recycling burnt tree limbs from the Blue Mountain bushfires as sculptures that seemingly stand as both a testament to time and a refusal to succumb to the destructive intensity of the bushfire heat.

His drone video slowly circling a forest of trees is a profound statement of the beauty of this land and its survival through the passage of time. Projecting the video on a bed of salt acknowledges the deep history of the Blue Mountains which millions of years ago existed below sea level. This initself for Zhang is the perfect synergy of time, in a sense of regional locality, that connects mountains to the sea in a profoundly holistic and interdependent Buddhist relationship that suggests for him a deep love and care of this place, and allows him to create a meditative installation of quiet respect for this ancient land.

— Nicholas Tsoutas