He Sen (1968)

Horizons

He Sen engages with a reflective artistic practice where his landscapes become sites of memory, identity, and quiet questioning. Drawing on the visual language of classical Shanshui - traditional Chinese landscape paintings - the imagery is deliberately fragmented: split into vertical passages that feel like partial recollections rather than continuous views. This interruption suggests not a loss, but a searching: an attempt to reconnect with a cultural and natural legacy that can no longer be accessed seamlessly.

Nature in He Sen’s work is not simply depicted; it is something to be evoked and re-approached. The softened horizons and drifting forms create a sense of distance, as if the landscape were both present and just out of reach. Within this space, identity itself feels unsettled, no longer fixed, but shaped through memory, displacement, and reconstruction.

The works quietly question what it means to belong to a tradition or to a place when both are experienced through fragments. What emerges is a contemplative tension, where reconnection to nature, cultural inheritance, and the search for identity remain open, unresolved, and deeply intertwined.

May 2026