From Flat Mountain to Strange Night
Deng Yuanchu’s ink works in this exhibition draw on her two journeys to Tibet. A central thread running through the exhibition is the bodily sensations prompted by the contrasting conditions of day and night at high altitudes, and the ways in which these conditions transform the act of looking.
The scenes depicted are neither imagined landscapes nor symbolic representations of Tibet. Rather, they emerge from the artist’s direct encounters with specific places: earthen walls built into the slopes of temple grounds, gently sloping snowfields shaped by ancient glaciers, the snow-covered terrain of the Tanggula Mountains, and the distant, diminutive peaks glimpsed from an airplane cabin high above the ground. Together, these encounters form the tangible experiences from which her work takes shape.
In Flat Mountain, “mountain” and “flat” appear to belong to contradictory visual experiences, yet Deng Yuanchu’s paintings establish a connection between the two. By deliberately toning down the imposing visual presence of the plateau’s terrain, she explores how these seemingly opposing elements can coexist through different types of terrain, natural processes, emotional perceptions, and viewing perspectives.
In Strange Night, the compositions become increasingly pared back. As specific details recede, the mountain landscapes are reduced to broad planes of form. The stark contrasts between light and shadow evoke the physical sensation of dizziness that can arise at high altitudes, along with a sense of visual haze and perceptual uncertainty.
Across both series, Deng Yuanchu eschews the grandeur and romanticism often associated with high-altitude landscapes, instead capturing a sense of coldness and estrangement embedded in the contours of the mountains. Imbued with a distinctive sensory memory, her works portray the nameless, uncelebrated peaks scattered across the vast, desolate expanses of the plateau.
About the Artist
Deng Yuanchu was born in Sichuan in 1993 and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. Her works have been presented at Space 185 of Shanghai Bund Art Center in 2025
and at the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair.
Working primarily in ink on paper, Deng’s practice often grows out of encounters with unfamiliar geographies and the sensory experiences of moving through them on foot. Her diffuse compositions accord equal weight to the various elements within a landscape. As short, fleeting brushstrokes gradually accumulate and merge, details emerge and recede in turn, hovering between proximity and distance. What takes shape are images of “non-places”—landscapes suspended between texture, unknown topographies, and indistinct memories.
Here, the term shanshui (literally “mountains and water,” or landscape) temporarily sheds the weight of its long cultural history, returning to the material forms of the natural world.