Within Stone, A Thousand Mountains
2026
Within Stone, A Thousand Mountains reinterprets the tradition of Chinese scholars’ rocks through a series of contemporary aluminium sculptures that merge industrial materiality with contemplative form. Inspired by gongshi — naturally weathered stones revered by Chinese literati as miniature sacred landscapes — the works translate ancient philosophical and spiritual ideals into a contemporary sculptural language.
Cast in reflective aluminum, the sculptures retain the asymmetrical contours and perforated surfaces associated with classical scholars’ rocks while introducing an almost immaterial quality of light and distortion. Balancing monumentality with intimacy, the works evoke imagined mountain worlds shaped equally by nature, memory, and transformation.
Long regarded as objects of meditation and transcendence, scholars’ rocks served as conduits to distant landscapes and interior reflection. In this series, that contemplative tradition is reactivated through forms that oscillate between the geological and the industrial, the physical and the metaphysical.