Entering and Exiting the Museum: Hu Yun’s "Distant Mountains" at the Seven Intersections of the Rockbund Art Museum
Written by Liu Lin
Edited by Yang Yao
“Hu Yun: Mount Analogue", installation view, Rockbund Art Museum, 2024, photo by Yan Tao ©️Rockbund Art Museum
In the inaugural exhibition of the Rockbund Art Museum's Spring 2024 research season, "Complex Geographies: Chinese Magazines", titled “Mount Analogue", artist Hu Yun presents for the first time a concentrated display of his works developed over the past decade surrounding the themes of knowledge, history, narrative, and individual experience. Taking as its point of entry the original premises of the museum—the earliest natural history museum in China, built in 1933 and formerly known as the Royal Asiatic Society Museum—Hu Yun arranges a vast array of “characters” featured in his works across different temporal and spatial settings, deliberately fragmenting 22 groups/pieces for reenactment. Spanning the vertical space from the third to the sixth floor, the architecture of the Rockbund Art Museum is abstracted as a model of the "museum" as a knowledge system. Through the artist’s orchestrated interweaving of historical events, personal experiences, and narratives of the "non-human" natural, the exhibition reflects on the ontology of the museum itself, activating overlooked, fragile, and invisible histories and realities beyond standardized museological narratives. This article, indexing the “characters” in Hu Yun's works and borrowing from the intertextual structures within his creations, offers an alternative route lost beyond the exhibition site.
「Hazrat Ali」
In 1908, the American art collector, philanthropist, and heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune, Robert Sterling Clark, organized an expedition to the northwestern provinces of China for exploration and research. Prior to departure, Clark assembled a specialized team that included artists, meteorologists, naturalists, and interpreters. Hazrat Ali, a surveyor recruited by Clark in the British Indian state of Punjab, who had spent 15 years working in surveying for the British Indian Army and was proficient in English, Chinese, and five other languages, was part of this team. On May 16, 1908, the expedition embarked on a long journey that would cover 3,200 kilometers, collecting valuable materials concerning China's natural geography, flora, fauna, and cultural history along the way. However, on June 21, Ali went to map a mountain peak nine kilometers from the camp and never returned. It is said that Ali was setting up his equipment on a sacred mountain believed by locals to govern the weather, and was perceived as causing a drought, leading to his being beaten to death by the locals. Thus, the ambitious Shaanxi-Gansu exploration was abruptly terminated, along with Ali's life journey. When rereading Through Shên-kan: the account of the Clark expedition in north China, 1908–9, a book compiled by Clark and others, Hu Yun discovered a mounted portrait of Ali. Emulating Ali's attire and using early 20th-century stereoscopic photography techniques that were popular in global exploration fields at the time, Hu replicated the pivotal moment of this individual's fate. In the photograph, the saddle appears placed on a stack of yoga mats, led by thin ropes, and is suspended in the center of the exhibition hall.
「Arthur de Carle Sowerby」
“HU YUN: MOUNT ANALOGUE", INSTALLATION VIEW, ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM, 2024, PHOTO BY YAN TAO ©️ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
In the team led by Clark, there was an explorer and naturalist proficient in Chinese culture, named Arthur de Carle Sowerby, also transliterated as Su Keran. Sowerby, a British scholar who grew up in Taiyuan, Shanxi, and was fluent in the local dialect before the age of fifteen, later served as the curator of the Royal Asiatic Society Museum in Shanghai. In the parallel exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum, titled "Re-writing Shanghai: Reconstructing the Asiatic Society Library of the early 20th Century" (hereafter referred to as "Re-writing Shanghai"), Sowerby was one of the six key figures involved in deciphering the institution's own history—the others being the sinologist and honorary librarian of the Asiatic Society Florence Ayscough, sinologist and art collector John Calvin Ferguson, physician and philanthropist Wu Lien-teh, a specimen craftsman from the Tang family, and the previously mentioned Robert Sterling Clark. In the book Through Shen-kan and the old photographs displayed at "Re-writing Shanghai," an image of Sowerbear with a chick is particularly eye-catching. In the local theatrical genre of Shanxi, known as Jin Opera, there is a specialized skill called "Lingzi Gong," which relies on head movements and body changes to perform high-difficulty actions encompassing various poses and forms. This aligns with the intersection experienced by Hu Yun during his 2010 residency at Gasworks in London, focusing on his visit to the Asian collections at the Natural History Museum. In the installation The Secret Garden: Reeves's Pheasant (2012–2015), Hu Yun focused his curiosity on an amateur naturalist named Rives, who during his stay in China from 1812 to 1831 "discovered" and named a species of pheasant. The artist placed fragments of archives related to this pheasant (Jin Opera excerpts, chick feathers, wallpaper patterns, etc.) in a chaotic manner in front of the audience, inviting them to reconstruct the narrative through their own experiences.
「Homing Pigeon」
“HU YUN: MOUNT ANALOGUE", INSTALLATION VIEW, ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM, 2024, PHOTO BY YAN TAO ©️ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
On May 12, 2024, another geomagnetic storm struck. Approximately six months earlier, in December 2023, a high-intensity geomagnetic storm had caused a homing pigeon, which relies on the Earth's magnetic field for navigation, to land unexpectedly before reaching its migration destination. This incident occurred outside the entrance of Hu Yun's solo exhibition at the AIKE Gallery. Inspired by this event, the artist created Aurora (2023), which serves to mark the "entanglement between tiny individuals and the complex cosmos," and challenges the conventional notion of a "final destination" in our thinking model.
「Mount Analogue」
The title of this exhibition is taken from the unfinished adventure novel Mount Analogue (Virtual Mountain) by René Daumal, a 20th-century French writer, philosopher, and poet. The novel depicts a unseen mountain peak that can only be reached through a special spiritual state - the Virtual Mountain. The process of climbing the mountain symbolizes the transcendence of the blurred boundaries between reality and transcendence, material and spirit, and visible and invisible. René Daumal wrote, "Its towering peak reaches into the realm of eternity, while its base spreads in different forms throughout the world of decay, forming its base. It is through this mountain that man ascends to the sacred, and the sacred reveals itself to man." For Clark, Suad, and Ali, the aborted expedition and life cannot offset their attempt to approach this virtual mountain. Human beings always imagine obtaining what they cannot have. A systematic body of natural history knowledge leads us to be too confident in our judgments about the history and existence of the world's forms, often overlooking the complexity of invisible history (i.e., reality/truth). Just like the bobbing up and down of the Royal Asiatic Society throughout its nearly century-long history, a new building was constructed in 1933, it was taken over by the government in 1952, leased to Qingdao Securities Company in 1990, and finally reopened to the public in 2010 as the Overseas Boulevard Art Museum by British architect David Chipperfield. Many individuals appear in this space and perform their unfinished life scripts.
Hu Yun, Everything Is Possible In the Darkness, 2016, “HU YUN: MOUNT ANALOGUE", INSTALLATION VIEW, ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM, 2024, PHOTO BY YAN TAO ©️ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
Among those who failed to reach the Mount Analogue, there is also Hu Yun's grandfather, who also plays an important role in Hu Yun's creation. Influenced by the influential work of American left-wing journalist Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, Hu's grandfather joined the Communist Party of China and longed for the Red Sect as a holy land, but was unable to fulfill his wish. In Hu Yun's series of visits and research on the Shaanxi-Gansu region, this regret was somewhat compensated. However, in the exhibition hall, the photo series Everything Is Possible in the Darkness (2016), consisting of ten sets of photography without any images, shows this compensatory effort as complete nothingness. Hu Yun re-photographs through photos of ten important moments in his grandfather's life and previewed them in the darkroom, causing the images to "hover in a abstract brown," eventually disappearing as the emulsion darkened. The national and collective fate composed of countless individuals loses and disappears in this abstraction.
「Ah Foo」
HU YUN, UNKNOWN CLOUDS, 2021-2024, “HU YUN: MOUNT ANALOGUE", INSTALLATION VIEW, ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM, 2024, PHOTO BY YAN TAO ©️ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
In 2021, Hu Yun was stranded in Australia due to the pandemic of COVID. While visiting the Chinese mine area in Victoria, he discovered a list of miners from 160 years ago, compiled by white people and mixed with the accent of the Tai Shan dialect in China. For example, "Ah Foo", "Chung Leong", "Ah Hoe". These lists were generally abbreviated or recorded with nicknames. Therefore, in his work Unknown Clouds (2021-2024), the artist engraved these names on 376 rice grains using micropenwork, and placed them in a celadon porcelain cup fragment that he found on the mine site. This allowed the distorted, scattered, and reduced images of this group to become apparent once again. And on the walkway of the Rockbund Art Museum, these abstract shapes transformed into single, bitter blocks - they come from "super plants" grown by Australian mining laboratories on the sites of Chinese laborers' mines, which can absorb heavy metals from the soil in an astonishing way. The artist extracted minerals from the stems and leaves of these plants, and used them to create mineral pigments for portraiture of non-human subjects that will replace humans and enter inevitable, endless labor in the future.
「”Tang Specimens”」
In the history of the Rockbund Art Museum, there have been many significant events that have shaped the development of the institution. However, there is little mention of the residents who lived in the area during different eras. When reviewing the experiences of important figures in the Society for the Promotion of Science Amongst the Asiatic People (Asia Culture Promotion Society), the name Tang Wang Wang repeatedly appears. Tang Wang Wang, originally named Tang Qiwang, was a hunter who lived on the Minjiang river (闽江) and made a living from fishing and hunting. He became interested in bird specimens after frequently selling bird and animal feathers to La Touche, a renowned Chinese ornithologist. Over the course of nearly a century, Tang Wang Wang's family became known as the "Tang specimens," having a profound influence on the history of natural scientific research in modern China. In 1906, with Tang Wang Wang's assistance in preparing specimens, La Touche published The Collection of Birds in the Shanghai Museum, which laid the foundation for modern Chinese bird taxonomy.
However, in 1952, the family was evicted from their home on Huqiu Road 20 and accused of "communist infiltration" during the Cultural Revolution, due to their “Catholic religious beliefs”. It was not until 1984 that they were officially cleared of these charges. In fact, the earliest indigenous Christian organization in China, the "Shanghai Young Men's Christian Association" (Chinese YMCA), was established in 1900 at No. 20 Huqiu Road. In the exhibition, Hu Yun's work No Such Person (2024) responds to this historical narrative: candles, made using a wax production method from the Song-Yuan dynasty in China—a technique that was later acquired by Western missionaries—slowly burn and melt, with the dripping wax falling onto a copper plate engraved with the rubbings of the "Nestorian Stele" inscription, known as "Da Qin Christian Stele Spread in China". Ultimately, the wax splatters and gradually covers the work 2.02.1861 (2009) by Danh Võ, a Danish-Vietnamese artist. This piece transcribes the last letter written by the French missionary Jean-Défina Werneal to his father before his execution in Vietnam in 1861. Thus, within this artwork, entities and individuals from three distinct temporal and existential dimensions intricately converge.
「The History’s Lead-in」
HU YUN, THE Hollow-Men, 2024, “HU YUN: MOUNT ANALOGUE", INSTALLATION VIEW, ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM, 2024, PHOTO BY YAN TAO ©️ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
The Rockbund Art Museum is renowned for its iconic atrium and colonnade structure. Artist Hu Yun attempts to connect this space vertically. He took cues from the placement of display cases in old photographs from the 1930s of the Rockbund Art Museum, preserved by the Royal Asian Art Society (R.A.S.). Furthermore, influenced by the narrative of “hollow-men" in the Mount Analogue, Hu utilizes black gauze stretched to its limits within the space, conjuring a tree-like structure that transcends categorization and standardization. In the narrative, the protagonist eventually finds his hollow counterpart, merging with it to become a whole being. Hu likens the continual explorations within both the museum and historical context to the state of hollow-men, suggesting that in nearly uncontrollable extreme experiments, we incessantly strive to fill the void within ourselves. This conceptual framework is physically represented by a structure composed of four hollow-men, amidst which grow several palm leaves. For Hu, palm leaves are a central motif, symbolizing trophies of Western colonization. In the exhibition space, he crafted a stilt spanning the museum's atrium, inspired by the early Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts ("Bei Ye"). Despite the precarious balance between history and reality, the need for escape persists.
Perhaps this text has been misleading thus far. Research fetishism, or the arrogance bred by knowledge, can interfere with the outcome of art—the artwork itself. Trained and cultured audiences expect to acquire knowledge in museums and to capture aesthetics in art galleries; they find themselves intolerable in the face of disorientation within the complex narratives presented in exhibition halls. “Hu Yun: Mount Analogue,” however, allows us to overlook any detail of the exhibition and thereby escape the modernity and precision that the museum system symbolically captures. Perhaps those with forgetfulness might gain more from Hu Yun's work. For instance, in Untitled (from the narrative of a five years expedition) (2016–2017), Hu Yun strips specific images from illustrations made by the British artist William Blake for the memoirs of John Gabriel Stedman, a Dutch-British soldier and writer, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796): Memory is constructed on the foundation of forgetting. In “Hu Yun: Mount Analogue,” audiences have the right to recreate, fabricate, or ignore the parts they forget. Compared to speculations developed from various types of "knowledge bases," including this text, Hu Yun focuses on the overall sensory experience provided by the exhibition and anticipates attempts to escape history and time in a discussion almost ontological about museums, reimagining the possibilities "beyond the museum."
