Shanshui(Prophecy)
Kien Situ
Master of Architecture | University of Newcastle
“Kien Situ (b.1990) is an architectonic artist whose practice spans sculpture and space. Informed by his diasporic heritage at the juncture of contemporary global cultural theory with ancient Sinospheric philosophies, he explores matter, ruin, distance, numerology, and time in relation to cultural dislocation.”
Chinese Mo Ink + Gypsum Cement + Titanium + Incense Ash
Artist Statement
国ḉ山河åœ̈æ ̃¥æœ›
The country is broken, though mountains and rivers remain
æ ̃¥æœ›,æœç”«
Spring Scene, Du Fu
757
The Chinese character for ink (å¢̈) is composed of two other chinese characters: black (黑) and earth (土), due to the elemental and subterranean origins of the dusky minerals used in its production.Home, for me, is a transient, formless and flexile state, bounded by precise conceptual, cultural, structural and spatial frameworks. With a background spanning art and architecture, my understanding of home is rooted in geological formation (matter and origins), ruptured and terraformed by movement over distance and time (change and potential). Central to my inquiries is how we relate to nature and environments, exploring their connection to space, heritage, and identity through architectural propositions.Drawing from my Chinese-Vietnamese heritage, I juxtapose ancestral practices, materials and philosophies with contemporary global cultural theory and construction techniques. This interplay manifests in works composed of Chinese ink fused with architectural materials like concrete orgypsum, bridging the regional and historical with the technical and industrial. Embodying the tensions of my cultures which have a tense relationship between colonial oppression and resistance-this inherited 'third space' manifests itself as artworks that are both monumentaland iconoclastic atonce. Known for its formlessness, ink holds infinite potential to convey spirit and thought, as seen in calligraphy and Shanshui paintings. For me, home resides in these transformative materials, reflecting an ongoing dialogue between past, present and future.
Synopsis
Shanshui(Prophecy) appears as a ruptured and inverted spherical landscape, reimagining a planetary form into an interior terrain —ruptured,displaced, and fragmented. It is both prophecy and reflection, a vision of the past refracted into an uncertain future. The familiar dissolves into theunfamiliar, echoing the cultural displacements, ecological degradation and civilisational upheaval shaping our contemporary world.The interior space of the object is destabilized, resembling a broken world with a bent, interior gravity transgressing the gravitational laws of nature-an inversion of natural order at the cost of progress. As the terrain fractures, it becomes a multidimensional landscape, a murky black mirror as thesurface upon which Venice sits, reflecting the psychological and spiritual dissonance of a universal condition.This work presents as a continuation into theartistâ€s research into dislocated material narratives, furthering the development of an inventedcomposite he terms †̃multi-dimensionalmatter.†Fusing geological elements spanning ancient, modern, futuristic, and mystical realms, heposits new temporal, spatial, and relational dimensions as these elements converge in harmonic tension. The resultant synthesisforms a singularentity, unifying Chinese Mò ink (2D, ancient), concrete (3D, modern), titanium (4D, futuristic), and incense ash collected froma local Chinesetemple (5D, mystical) with fragments of old artworks, embodying an accumulation of time across epochs and environments.Echoing the hyper-granular variations in multicultural lived experiences of displaced peoples globally and in Australia, this artwork is able to adoptmyriad personalities as it is rotated and placed at different angles.Shanshui(Prophecy) is not only a meditation on fracture but a proposition for new material futures — where past and future, destruction andrenewal, are held in simultaneous tension. It challenges the stability of landscape and identity itself, transforming it intoasite of dislocation,inversion, and potentiality
