Asian Art Museum of San Francisco Presents
"A Tree and A Forest: Past Continuous Tense by Lam Tung Pang"
16 December 2022 - 18 September 2023
Lam Tung Pang's gallery-spanning installation Past Continuous Tense (2011) will be presented in Asian Art Museum of San Francisco from 16 December 2022 onwards. Guest Curated by Mia Yinxing Liu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Johns Hopkins University, the 52 panels installation introduces audiences to layers of encounter and transmission: the natural world was first mediated through past masters of ink painting, then re-mediated by a learned few into the art books and painting manuals that Lam drew from for this work.
Lam’s montage of artist historical references, rendered at a scale both intimate and lifelike, produces an arresting interactive experience with both history and nature, at once contemplative and problematic. The artist’s forest, created from canonical imagery of the past, invites reflection on our relationship to nature, our current era of ecological devastation, and the relationship between the virtual and the real. The use of fire on wood is a keen reference to the fragility of both our cherished artworks and lived natural environment.
Past Continuous Tense
Charcoal, image transfer, acrylic on wood
244 x 1560 cm
2011
…Wisdom from the old days sometime is just like a joke for today, What does tradition mean today? How it is perceived and what does it contribute to our contemporary life? I went back to lookup at traditional Chinese Painting, which I always failed during my school days. This work, Past Continuous Tense, is formed by those questions and copying of images of trees from ink paintings including Korean and Japanese…
Image Courtesy
Lam Tung Pang Studio
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
Learn more --
https://exhibitions.asianart.org/exhibitions/past-continuous-tense/
