T he trajectory of human civilisation has long been haunted by the twin spectres of collapse and rebirth. “I met a traveller from an antique land,” begins the fabled sonnet Ozymandias (1819) by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Over 14 lines, Shelley goes on to describe a scene of utter desolation, a memento mori for empires and emperors that resounds ever louder more than two centuries later. While Shelley famously captured the “lone and level sands” of a vanished antiquity, the mid-century visions of J. G. Ballard catapulted that sense of desolation into the near future. Where Shelley saw the erosion of stone, Ballard saw the fragmentation of the psychological and the technological — the “terminal beach” of a dystopia where the relics of our own era, from scrap metal jute sacks to satellites, become the new “shattered visages” of the 21st century. This exhibition examines this very intersection where the Romantic obsession with ruin meets the Ballardian post-apocalyptic reality of a culture remade from its own wreckage.
And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
The king’s empire has vanished leaving only empty words, yet the work of the artist endures, shattered but more vital and urgent than ever. From Urs Fischer’s giant bronze feet to Yayoi Kusama’s boundless infinity nets, each of these contemporary masters offers up a very empathetic lens on human ambition, the passage of time, and the unrelenting power of nature.
“I met a traveller from an antique land”
Old Vines on Juliet's Villa (2011-2012) by Beijing-born artist Zeng Xiaojun was exhibited at the Musée Guimet in Paris in 2012. Traversing the worlds of the past and present, Zeng uses traditional Chinese ink to depict huge, gnarled vines weathered by the vicissitudes of time. Only the title, a reference to the medieval home of the Capulets in Verona, forces us to remember the human passion that these vines once witnessed. “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo,” ended Shakespeare’s rendition of the tragic tale of “star-cross’d” lovers caught between feuding families.
“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone”
A giant foot, its surface striated and shiny like wet clay, sits next to a mammoth glob of clay, both cast in bronze. Nearby are the fragments of a life-sized reclining female nude, cast in bronze and festooned with dribbles of oil paint, smears of palladium leaf, clay bole and chalk. Channelling the spirit of Shelley with Big Foot and Untitled (both 2014), Urs Fischer taps into an absurdist sense of “fragmented history,” parodying the ruins of classical antiquity and the whims of its most famous egotists embodied in sculptures such as the dismembered giant marble foot of the Colossus of Constantine and Canova’s Neoclassical portrait of Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix.
“Stand in the desert”
Echoing the eerie silence of the desert, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s work suggests the kind of ruin that lies in the muting of an empire. For nearly two decades Gork has deployed sound as a sculptural and architectural medium. Attenuator No. 6 (2021) consists of sound-dampening materials typically hidden behind modern drywall. Absorbing energy to bring about a carefully calculated manipulation of sound, this massive work brings to light the unseen mechanics of control and power.
“The lone and level sands stretch far away”
“Dissolution and accumulation; propagation and separation; particulate obliteration and unseen reverberations from the universe”: INFINITY-NETS (OQBABT) (#2494) (2007), a mammoth five metres wide and two metres tall, enfolds viewers in Yayoi Kusama’s poetic and yet terrifying vision of infinity. But it also offers a chance of new life — obliterating this surface with infinity nets, according to Kusama’s logic, allows that body to be assimilated and absorbed into something timeless, freeing its creator to reach oblivion alongside its creation. Like the twinkling lights that illuminate and obliterate the night sky, it is a picture of hope amidst the inevitability of destruction.
“Half sunk”
Shinro Ohtake’s Time Memory – Fault 5 (2015) is a poignant physical ledger of our material existence. Rather than a singular, polished monument, Ohtake constructs a sedimentary history out of the “colossal wreck” of the everyday — layers of hemp cloth, packing paper, and pulp magazines that form a dense, geological strata of waste. For the artist, this slow, tactile accumulation of discarded memories and excavated scraps of civilisation are an incisive meditation on the nature of time itself:
"I think about “time” as a flow that continuously penetrates the infinite “layers” of memories of the past. That flow is not necessarily linear. It repeatedly moves forward, backward and in all directions within the layers of memory, even as it leads back to the present.”
“A shattered visage lies”
Monument (1984) by the French conceptualist Christian Boltanski is an altarpiece to the unspoken violence of memory. A nameless visage of the past rests atop 26 photographs of a mottled vermilion red fabric, its features simultaneously illuminated by a constellation of gleaming bulbs and obliterated by their trailing electrical wires that criss-cross like shiny scars of the recent past.
“Whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”
The mixed media paintings of American artist Matthew Day Jackson explore his concept of “the Horriful”: the belief that everything one does has the potential to bring about both astounding beauty and abject horror. Creating his own pathetic fallacies, in Mirror IX (2018) Day Jackson physically scars the surface of a digital C-print of a space satellite with scorch marks, burnt yarn, wood glue and sawdust. No longer an objective depiction of one of mankind’s greatest achievements, it is instead a commentary on human ego, our destructive relationship with the environment, and the ultimate failure of the American Dream.
“Tell that its sculptor well those passions read”
Apparatus (2022) by the transdisciplinary artist Jes Fan, originally exhibited at the 2022 Venice Biennale, is an uncanny construct fluctuating between clinical precision and prurient fleshliness. Sleek wooden and metal lab-like frameworks support bulging hand-blown glass vessels (often infused with bodily fluids) which ooze beyond their confines, struggling to contain their own potent materiality. Amidst passionate debates about social constructs of race and gender in today’s world, Fan’s works distill simpler and more profound questions about the essence of humanity beyond binary definitions.
“Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things”
British land artist David Nash is known for working with wood from trees that have fallen or been felled due to disease or age. “I don’t invent anything,” says Nash. “I like thinking that I simply ‘find’ things.” Splinters, knots, or other traces of growth and decay adorn these abstract totems, markers attesting to the inexorable passage of time and the sublime power of the earth, water, fire and wind to transform what once seemed unassailable. Hooded Light (2015), sculpted from charred Hokkaido Birch, stands alongside Spiral (2014), a bronze cast of a wooden sculpture now preserved for posterity.
“Nothing beside remains”
Carved into a sheer rock face at the site of Nişantaşı, Domingo Milella’s Hattusa Hieroglyphs (2011) documents the 8.5-metre long, 11-line inscription that once marked the dominion of the Hittite Empire’s imperial capital (1600-1200 BCE). This powerful ancient civilisation in modern day Turkey, believed by scholars to be the same Hittites recorded in the Biblical Old Testament, had a long and storied history: descended from Noah, they were owners of the land where Abraham stayed in Hebron and buried his wife Sarah, and two Hittite women married Abraham’s grandson Esau. Today, this hieroglyphic inscription, its precise meaning lost to history, is one of the few physical traces that survive of this once-great civilisation.
“Of that colossal wreck”
The Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s installation Zizaach (2016) is a powerful exploration of the “colossal wreckage” wrought by global capitalism. Stitching together scrap metal tarpaulin and charcoal sacks, Mahama creates a monumental surface marked by the physical stains of global trade and invisible human toil. These jute sacks represent the exhaustion behind empires past and present — a living, breathing record of the nameless and faceless people who built our world.
“Boundless and bare”
Hong Kong-based artist Lui Chun Kwong’s Landscape No. AB00233 (2015), one of the artist’s largest works, offers an ascetic take on the Romantic idea of nature. Stripping away the ornamental aesthetics of classical Chinese landscape painting, he reaches a transcendental stripped-back formulation of line, shape and fields of pure colour that embody the elemental forces of nature. His canvas is a monument to the endurance of the earth, rendered with a discipline that feels both ancient and urgently contemporary.
