At the Huntington, running through August 4, 2025 in the Studio for Lodging the Mind, visitors can enter Without Us, an immersive art exhibit created by Wang Mansheng, the Huntington’s 2025 Cheng Family Foundation Visiting Artist.
The studio’s name invites meditation, as does the opening of the exhibit’s introductory museum label: “Imagine a pristine landscape. What do you see? Where are we?”
To meditate on Without Us, keep in mind the following from the “Artist’s Statement” in the exhibit guide available at the Huntington’s Web site: “What would the world be like without humans? What has the world become with humans? These are questions I asked when creating Without Us.”
“Where are we?”
At the Huntington, the Studio for Lodging the Mind is in the Chinese Garden. The gallery space is a single well-lit windowless room.
“What do you see?”
Entering, visitors find large raw silk panels hanging from the ceiling. On these the artist has painted landscape scenes: a bamboo forest adjacent a stream, a mountain range, a tree, and so on. The twenty-two panels’ arrangement forms a chamber visitors enter to be surrounded by the landscape depictions.
The paintings’ color pallet is minimal: grays, black, a light khaki brown occasionally, and the muted white of the silk.
The silk cloth is quite thin and absorbent of the artist’s ink. In painting a landscape on one side of a panel, the artist automatically rendered the same landscape on the other side.
Rabbits and ducks inhabit the landscapes.
The scale of the scenes varies, from trees on which visitors observe life-size silkworms to a triptych of panels showing a mountain range with clouds floating just below the peaks.
The silk seems delicate and ethereal. The landscapes appear substantial and rugged.
On the gallery’s dark blue walls are passages from classical Chinese authors, in the original calligraphic characters and translated into English. For example: “Clear the mind and behold the Way. Zong Bing (375–443).”
The panels’ scenes are “Without Us,” that is, without Homo sapiens.
Yet “Without” also means “outside.” In this meaning-valence, “Without” implies a great outdoors of bamboo forests, mountains, silkworms, and so on. There’s us, and somewhere without us, outside us, distinct, singular, real entities, that rabbit, that rock, that stream, exist. Imagine that.
“Imagine a pristine landscape.”
With the word “pristine,” complexities arise prompting consideration of the artist’s “with humans” question.
In the panel depicting a bamboo forest, the stalks are free of inscriptions. In the Huntington’s bamboo forest, a short walk from the studio, a sign commands, “DO NOT WRITE ON BAMBOO.” Adjacent bamboo stalks bear marks, mostly of the amatory “Joe + Jane” type.
In the studio, signage admonishes, “Do Not Touch.” With the panels, to which visitors can step face-to-silk close, adhering strictly to this admonition becomes problematic. Human exhalations contain water vapor, volatile organic compounds, and DNA, not to mention viruses and bacteria. Breathing visitors leave their biological signatures, like fingerprints, on the panels.
The question of staging a pristine outdoors inside a gallery gets further complicated in our era of human-caused global warming. The day of my visit, the silk panels swayed in the breeze from the AC system, which was battling yet abetting (being fossil fueled) the day’s 93-degree Fahrenheit temperature, a significant deviation from San Marino’s 77-degree historical average for May 30th.
The ironies Without Us sets off speak to the rigor of the artist’s conception of his project. The word “pristine” well describes the artist’s composition and brushwork in executing the panels.
Imagining a pristine landscape, what do you see? An imaginary landscape. Where are we? In the case of Without Us, we are immersed in Wang Mansheng’s complicated imaginings.
Deets
- Without Us, running until August 4, 2025
- The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino
- Admission information and tickets are available at the Huntington’s Web site
