Rock Balancing Land Art: A More-than-Human Approach

As it happened during the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, the art of balancing rocks had therapeutic effect of comforting me. It was the physical law of balance that had taken psychological effect through my performance of keeping rocks in balance. Setting out as an incidental and personal art practice in the beginning, it evolved quickly into an improvisational community art project, attracting hundreds of participants who together turned a torn embankment into a gallery of land art, bringing joy and consolation to each other during the difficult period. The dynamics behind that improvisational artistic activity reminds me of the traditional Chinese philosophy of Tao-follows-nature (道法自然) that implies a more-than-human approach of art education. A retrospect into the rock art project and a study into Shan-Shui (山水), literally “mountain and water,” the genre of classical Chinese landscape painting, come up with an alternative understanding of art education that does not count on the teaching of a human teacher, but on a sensational leaning process empowered by the nature, which was compared to an artist’s surrogate pregnancy for the nature by Shitao, a Chinese art philosopher, in the 17th century.