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"Emei Mountains" is a large scroll painting by the renowned Beijing artist Bingyi created in 2018 at sacred Buddhistes mountain sites in China as a land and weather project that registers the effects of wind, sun, humidity, air pressure, and terrain with ink and water on bespoke xuan paper.
Bingyi's multifaceted practice spans ink, environmental and performance art, and site-specific architectural installations referencing Chinese landscape painting and ancient Daoist philosophy by adopting a non-anthropocentric perspective to channel nature's creative agency. Her inspiration for this work originated from a transcendental experience she had in 2009 while visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem. She reflects on her extraordinary encounter: "I stood there in awe and had a vision, seeing vast crying rivers; it felt like a whirling motion of collective weeping that feeds and cleanses all of the world's rivers. I credit this vision for taking up ink as my primary medium from that moment on."
In her large-scale ink paintings, Bingyi uses ink as "dark light" – carbon, an absolute absorber of light in water, nature's universal translucent solvent – to illuminate the usually invisible and transient physical processes that enable ordered patterns and forms to arise from chaos. Over months or even years, she collaborates with the environmental conditions of a specific site to capture a reality-scaled record of the climatic and topological forces shaping a natural or urban landscape. She then uses installation and performance to recuperate these forces in the live embodied experience of the viewer.
