Meng Zhou

The far flung mountains of Kulun, in Southwestern China, have long been the subject of myth and legend. Fabled in Chinese popular culture to be the home of deities, fenghuang (phoenixes) and the most extraordinary flora and fauna, the Kulun mountains have long been a place of the strange and the sublime.

In Langgan Meng Zhou shunts Kulun into the deep future, a future in which the bestial and the beautiful, the sacred and the profane, the celestial and the terrestrial, the organic and the technological, the conscious and the unconscious meet, dance, tussle, pollute, contaminate, bend into one another and eventually make peace with each other. An exercise in philosophical obsolescence these mythical-mutants took root in the dynasties of Zhou and Han and are flourishing into a techno-biological future.

The Langgan trees sprouting here are the result of an extraordinary and unexpected evolution, an evolution driven by cultural symbolic fusion, organic elemental amalgamation and data mitosis. The symbolic elements of their composition suggest that they exist somewhere between life and death, between myth and reality, between digital and material. An explanation for their appearance here cannot be given although it is thought that they may have arrived upon a cloud.

It is believed that an exegetical process similar to dream-work could be employed to better understand the manifest elements of their composition but this should be only initiated with caution.