Untitled (Patterned sheets projected over familiar mountains, death of an eco-cultural landscape), 2021

Digital projection, inkjet on cotton, nails
Varied dimensions

Artist Statement:

This work refers to the destruction of the landscape by my family’s home in China, where my dad grew up spending his days tending to the land, harvesting crops, and herding sheep, and where the mountains stood witness to my ancestors’ lives. Many subsistence farming villages like my dad’s have been wrecked by pressures of capitalism and growing industrial agriculture, resulting in the loss of healthy soil, farming culture, and mutuality with the land.

In my process, I created a stamp of a crop my family used to grow and designed it to look similar to Monsanto’s logo, which is an image of a plant outlined in a box. This image was repeatedly stamped in rows onto a sheet of white paper molded to the shape of mountains in a photograph my dad took. I edited these “sheets” onto the mountains to reference Monsanto’s role in propelling unsustainable farming practices in China and the consequences of this. Thinking about the gradual deterioration of land/culture/family/home, I felt an urgency to call attention to this and make it stop, but also a helplessness to make a change.

For me, the final image is a proposal of death but also a documentation of it. The destruction of this landscape means more than having unhealthy soil and water; it means loss of the village community, of cultural heritage, and of the possibility of me to reconnect with these.

Installation image, Changes With Exposure

Lucy Zhang

Artist Statement: