Faith Mountain
Tang Nannan
汤南南
Production date
2015
Object Detail
Media
video (colour, sound)
Measurements
4 min 3 sec
Notes
Faith Mountain (2015), is a mesmerising video work that conveys the inexorable power of natural forces. Oily, viscous, grey-black waves heave and swell under lowering storm clouds, a relentlessly repeating undulation, a metaphor of the prolonged shift in forming the Himalayan Mountains. Tang Nannan states, ‘transcending time, mountains would be waves of the earth and waves would be ‘water mountains’ of the sea.’ Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote of ‘the visceral green of consuming totality’; Tang’s work, similarly, evokes the Romantic sublime in its dramatic beauty. Unlike the English Romantic painter, Turner, who was said to have lashed himself to the mast of a sailing ship in a violent storm to experience the awesome power of nature, Tang shot the video from the shore, on a cliff at dusk just before a thunderstorm. The waves are, frankly, terrifying. What monsters might emerge from the deep?
Accession number
2016.047