Swallow & Spit Pt. I: A Group Exhibition

To represent a landscape, an artist should do two things: swallow and spit. At least, so said Karel van Mander in his Schilder-Boeck (Book of Painters; 1604), where he describes the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder as having “swallowed all those mountains and rocks which, upon returning home, he spat out again onto canvas and panels”. And in so doing, Bruegel was able to “so faithfully… follow Nature”.

Van Mander’s description examples a familiar understanding of landscape art, one that involves explaining an artist’s agency over nature through their devouring of all its epiphanic qualities. Today, generative AI models provide us with new and easier ways to satiate this churning impulse, allowing users to generate fictional landscapes and expand existing ones with natural language descriptions. Upon ingestion, these quaaludic images serve to ease our anxieties about the otherwise industrial exploitation of nature that proceed around us.

But how can we speak about landscapes in different terms? The need for new registers of co-existing with our non-human others is growing restless. Swallow & Spit  introduces a breadth of practices that actively wrestle with landscape art’s complicit history with stories and ideas surrounding control and consumption, to restore an already fraught relationship with stories beyond extraction.

Alvin Lau

Amin Taasha

bani haykal

Chong Yan Chuah

Condro Priyoaji

Đặng Thùy Anh

Danot

Jao San Pedro

Kentaro Hiroki

PaKa

Yee I-Lann