Chinese Garden 2
Dong Wensheng
董文胜
Production date
2005
Object Detail
Media
gelatin silver print
Measurements
80 x 80 cm
Notes
Dong Wensheng’s Chinese Garden series of 2005 is inspired by the melancholy beauty of southern Chinese gardens, enclosed and highly artificial landscapes seen here as a metaphor for China’s history. Shot in gardens in the southern city of Changzhou, they feature sculptural arrangements of ‘Taihu’ rocks (weathered, pitted limestone rocks from Taihu Lake in Jiangsu were highly prized additions to garden design), pools and waterfalls, pavilions with lanterns hanging from upturned eaves, and spindly pine trees. Chinese Garden 2 alludes to paintings by masters of the shan shui tradition: the foreground shows craggy rocks, twisted and weathered into seemingly impossible shapes, with the roof of a garden pavilion just visible behind them. On a closer inspection, the illusion is punctured by an incongruous flagpole with a drooping flag in the top left of the image. With this very simple device, Dong Wensheng makes us realise that these gardens are tiny pockets in the urban world, crowded on all sides by the new landscapes of modernity.
Accession number
2014.130