Curated by Bao Dong
Leo Gallery is pleased to present Mountain Vision (见山), a solo exhibition by artist Bian Qing, on view from April 26 to June 15, 2025. Featuring works from the past fifteen years, the exhibition traces Bian’s sustained engagement with the theme of shanshui (landscape), offering both a mid-career reflection and a renewed inquiry into the relationship between seeing, language, and image.
The title Mountain Vision is drawn from a well-known Zen Buddhist phrase found in Wudeng Huiyuan (五灯会元): “Seeing the mountain as a mountain, not as a mountain, and again, just as a mountain.” This layered process of recognition serves as both a metaphor for Bian Qing’s method and a key to entering his work. In his paintings, seeing refers to an experiential act of looking, while understanding unfolds through the dimensions of language, culture, and structure. His practice hovers between the construction and deconstruction of imagery, retaining the visual echo of landscape painting while consistently challenging its form and meaning.
Since 2010, Bian has been developing a systematic visual investigation rooted in the motif of landscape. His early works employed repeated wiping and blurring techniques in oil, rendering mountainous forms that appear half-concealed, as if shrouded in mist. These images evoke not a geographical reality, but a poetic echo—resonating with the idealized nature of traditional literati painting and mirroring a contemplative mode of seeing, where a tranquil world corresponds with an open, clear mind.
With the series Hidden Mountain Collection and Unveiled Mountain Collection, Bian began shifting landscape from a natural image to a cultural archetype. Rather than depict the shape of mountains, he engages them in visual dialogue. Blue-green and ochre tones intertwine with mi-dot textures (mi-dian) , while seal-script brushwork tentatively engages the spirit of Wei-Jin aesthetics across the canvas. The composition becomes a reassembled grammar of painting, where familiar techniques are inverted and recontextualized.
In more recent series—Back Mountain Collection, Chenzhou Collection, and The Unravelled Collection—Bian further distills the image into spatial relationships of line, form, and color. What he extracts from tradition is no longer image, but method. He no longer paints mountains, but constructs a visual language that can contain the thought of mountain. His brush no longer narrates but begins to weave—and at times, to build. His mountains increasingly resemble structures of thought rather than topographic forms, and in doing so, become ever more themselves.
It is worth noting that Bian’s painting approach carries both the fragmentary quality of literati notes and the density of philosophical writing. Each work unfolds like a visual inquiry—sometimes calm and declarative, sometimes abruptly interrupted. It is both statement and question. His images resist closure, remaining in a state of becoming, as if thought continues to meander across the canvas. Mountain Vision does not simply present a body of work—it stages an ongoing movement of thought through painting. Between seeing and knowing, Bian Qing asks again and again: What is a mountain? What is it to see? What does it mean to understand? His works are not representations of landscape, but visible pathways of thinking.
