Shi Guorui: Ab/Sense-Pre/Sense

Shi Guorui’s exhibition Ab/Sense-Pre/Sense presented spectacular landscape photographs up to 15-feet wide, created using giant camera obscuras, that pay homage to the landscapes and legacy of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), the artist known for launching America’s first major art and landscape movement, now known as the Hudson River School of painting.

Ab/Sense-Pre/Sense was presented simultaneously with three other exhibitions featuring historic and contemporary artists that engage the natural world through diverse depictions of the landscape: Thomas Cole: Memory and Inspiration, Kiki Smith: From the Creek, and Nicola López and Paula Wilson: Becoming Land.

To create the artwork for the exhibition, Shi Guorui retraced Cole's footsteps into the landscape and built life-size camera obscuras on location in order to make direct, extended, time-lapse exposures of these places in nature today. This included converting a 20-foot box truck into a camera obscura and building 20-foot-wide pinhole camera tents within the landscape. Using this centuries-old technology, Shi Guorui created new photographs of the iconic sites, painted by Cole, as found today in New York's Catskill Mountains, such as Catskill Creek, Kaaterskill Falls, North-South Lake, and Sunset Rock. These sites are made accessible through the Hudson River School Art Trail, an innovative outdoor program created by the Thomas Cole Site that connects visitors with the places in nature that Thomas Cole painted.

The box truck and tent camera obscuras (Latin for "dark room") that Shi Guorui constructed operate like giant cameras. Light is reflected into the room through a small hole that projects a direct image onto light-sensitive photographic paper. As with time-based art, the artist remains inside the camera during the entire exposure, which may last hours or even days. The resulting unique gelatin silver print can be up to 15 feet wide and has a depth of field that the human eye could not otherwise register and see on its own, showing both near and far elements of the landscape in sharp focus. Shi Guorui was interested in how they are "faithful portraits of pure light and time" and emphasized the timelessness and sweeping expanse of each place. Shi Guorui’s contemporary images drew upon both ancient Chinese landscape traditions and also forge direct connections to American landscape painting, reflecting Cole’s legacy and the natural landscape today.

Thomas Cole used a small camera obscura as a tool to frame the landscape and define the composition for his paintings. One of only a few photographers working today to use a giant camera obscura, Shi Guorui uses this ancient optical device to create monumental landscape panoramas. He chose this process to slow down time as a direct response to the frenetic pace of contemporary China and in contrast to our digital moment, where hundreds of millions of images are instantly uploaded to Facebook every day. In his slowed-down technique, only that which is not fleeting, that which endures over time, can be seen.

Shi Guorui, who built his own studio in Catskill, NY, is inspired not only by Cole's paintings but also by Cole’s writing, including his proto-environmentalist work, “Essay on American Scenery” (1836), and the unique history of this landscape. The photographic interpretations respond as much to the literal light, landscapes, and objects refracted through the lens, as they do to memory and the passage of time. He perceives the 171-year gap between his life and Thomas Cole’s as very short in comparison to the longer history of art. Like Cole, Guorui is fascinated by cycles, history, and time. Although working in different centuries, both artists wrestle with the impact of development, loss, and how to balance the built and natural worlds.

The exhibition was organized by the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and was curated by Kate Menconeri, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Contemporary Art, and Fellowship. A full-color print catalogue accompanied the exhibition and included an exclusive interview with the artist.

“This ambitious and dynamic photographic project offers new ways to see and consider the landscapes that inspired Thomas Cole,” said Elizabeth B. Jacks, Executive Director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. “Guorui is not only connecting 1825 with 2019 but also the traditions of landscape art from ancient China to contemporary America.”

“This exhibition explores landscape, history, and art in a cross-cultural exchange,” said Kate Menconeri, Chief Curator of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Presenting Shi Guorui’s work in conversation with Thomas Cole’s “connects two landscape traditions that each redefined how a nation was seen and offer a chance to consider our relationship to the natural world today."

"Time and space are sacred realities,” said Shi Guorui. "I am continually intrigued by the things that influence people and society to develop – by what allows life to go on. For an artist, it is a new experience as well as a challenge to leave the culture they are accustomed to, and to contemplate the future of their art from a different point of view, from another perspective.”

The exhibition expanded upon and was inspired by Shi Guorui’s site-specific exhibition Ab/Sense-Pre/Sense, originally presented in OPEN HOUSE: Contemporary Art in Conversation with Cole, a series of curated contemporary artist installations presented within the historic home and studios of the artist Thomas Cole. Operating from the concept that all art is contemporary, the program activated conversations between artists across the centuries and is collaborative by nature. Exhibitions and artworks have ranged from those that literally reference Cole’s iconic works to those that expand on issues and themes relevant to Cole, including art, landscape, history, and balancing the built and natural worlds. OPEN HOUSE project shed light on the connections between nineteenth century American art and our contemporary moment.