Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts (FSA) presents Emei Mountains (2018), a special work by the renowned Chinese artist Bingyi (b. 1975) for the Jerusalem Biennale in collaboration with Museum on the Seam, a socio-political contemporary art museum. Bingyi’s multifaceted practice spans land and environmental art, urban planning, site-specific architectural installation, musical and literary composition, ink painting, performance art, and filmmaking. She draws inspiration from Chinese Shan Shui landscape painting and ancient Daoist philosophy by adopting a non-anthropocentric perspective to channel nature’s creative agency, making her primary concerns the varied themes of ecology, ruins, rebirth, and poetic imagination. Bingyi’s inspiration for the Emei Mountains scroll series originated from a transcendental experience she had in 2009 visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem. She reflects on her extraordinary encounter: “I stood there in awe and had a vision, seeing vast crying rivers; it felt like a whirling motion of collective weeping that feeds and cleanses all of the world’s rivers. I credit this vision for taking up ink as my primary medium from that moment on.”

Moreover, the Emei Mountains performance and subsequent scroll paintings also represent the artist’s contemporary response to Ma Yuan’s famous water studies from the Southern Song Dynasty. Site-specifically created in China’s Taihang Mountains, her land-and-weather art practice engages China’s historical discourse on landscape painting for the very first time. The exhibit will feature an accompanying documentary video that captures the lengthy process of Bingyi’s work created within nature. Special thanks to Ram Ozeri, Founder and Director of the Jerusalem Biennale, and to Shir Aloni Year, Chief Curator at the Museum on the Seam, for this collaboration.