In Laksana – As Ice Melts, Eco-Imaginaries propose staging an exhibition, containing a collaborative interdisciplinary installation, addressing climate crisis’ global warming. Through multilayered analogies, this curatorial-artistic project focuses on global warming’s ecological impacts and urgencies. Global warming is evidenced by melting ice sheets and icebergs in the Arctic and Antarctic, causing loss and damage, not only in Polar regions, but also globally. Its ramifications for the planet are just beginning to be understood, particularly for underwater and shoreline life in oceanic zones. Laksana – As Ice Melts places transnational, interdisciplinary artists’ works into an imaginary dialogue, implicating rampant consumerism as one cause of global warming.
To do so, this exhibition’s installation is a mise-en-scène of interdisciplinary works, weaving a loose narrative, to simulate an abandoned clothing store. Femke Freeman’s rippling aquatic fabric installation (2024), evokes the watery fluidity of melting ice, flowing across the floor. Qianyi Li’s photographic series Lankasa, Ice (2023), exploits ice melting in the photographic process, so ice cubes seem to float quixotic, in a pool of blueness, within and along the paper’s surface. Beverley Harrison’s Iceberg (2024), creates sounds derived from melting ice, in a performance, based on random chance – silence and sound. In urban-nature counterpoint, Ziki Zang’s fashion film, In the Bloom of Body (2021), explores nature’s healing powers and human oneness with nature. Therefore, her sustainable fashion designs embody soft blues into pink and raised flower arrangements in relief. Flower arranging is an artform shown to alleviate depression. All these ecological propositions allude to changing states, analogous to melting ice, conferring transformation, in an abandoned commodified space.
Conveying pathos, empty loss and dereliction, the exhibition space includes a couch, wherein visitors lounge as spectators. They are invited to watch Zhang’s fashion video, while listening to the eerie sound of dripping water of ice slowly melting. The ice is hung encased in a sculptural object, and melts into three repurposed, now empty, florist’s buckets. Meanwhile, an actor wearing Zhang’s floral designs searches for flowers on wallpaper, languid yet agitated. Presence and absence haunt the space, a captive nature in an abandoned, dystopian urban environment, demonstrating climate crisis’ human-nature disconnect.
Yet, urban over-consumptions’ ecological effects are somewhat redressed through Zang’s sustainable fabrics and garments, as well as Qianyi Li’s insightful holistic ‘worlding’ perspective, embodied in Laksana Ice. In contemplating Laksana Ice, we reflect on ice’s qualities and imbibe the metaphoric beauty and interconnectedness of all life on earth, whether animate or inanimate. We recognise how everything is actually and symbolically implicated in how we perceive the world, ourselves, and nature. We become aware of how we navigate knowledge, how spiritual and epistemological enquiries intermingle. Her photographs expound nature and photography’s uncertainties, and through analogy, climate change’s interwoven environmental-human complexities.
Li explains how, Laksana is illusory, forever in flux, a projection mirroring our perception and the essence of things.
The lakṣana of all things is illusory and unreal. Everything is in flux. Everything is inscrutable,
similar to Sartre's being as nothingness. At a specific moment, when we
perceive something, we take a slice out of the flowing space and time.
What is presented to me is not the essence of the thing, but a combination
of its lakṣana, my projection of it, and the environment in which we
coexist, which dissolves back into nothingness after our genuine
encounter.
In this work, I have chosen to use cyanotype to capture the object's
existence beyond lakṣana. Flowers and leaves shrink, wither, and die when
exposed to the sun. Ice cubes melt on photographic paper,
leaving traces of change that evaporate and become invisible.
Water ripples and waves of light swell, projecting textures that are alien to the still image.
In this way, I try to help myself see through the lakṣana and approach the
essence of objects, to observe everything in an intermediate state between
being and nothingness. (Qianyi Li’s Portfolio Description, 2023)
As visitors become passive spectators, they nonetheless contemplate Li’s Laksana, Ice, observing and hearing ice melting. They therefore become aware of the climate crisis’ complexities and its over-consumerism causes, as well as the prospective future dystopian emptiness, alongside the real and attitudinal remedies behind climate crisis’ global warming and ice melting.