Robert Zhao Renhui. Changi, Singapore, Possibly 1970s (from the series As We Walked on Water), 2010–2012; digital photograph. Courtesy of Robert Zhao Renhui and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

For much of art history, seventeenth-century notions of a hierarchy of genres within painting classified landscapes as inferior to history paintings, which were often filled with religious iconography and scenes from mythology. Several centuries later, some contemporary audiences continue to perceive landscapes as prosaic, formulaic, or downright boring. The curators and featured artists of the exhibition Landscape: The Virtual, The Actual, The Possible? suggest that we as a civilization have moved beyond the bounds of this ancient genre, and quite possibly beyond the point of no return as a planet facing a global climate crisis.

The configuration of the gallery is unique. It opens and unfolds like a Chinese scholar’s garden. Liang Shuo’s Fit #9 (2010), a playful assemblage of found toys, tools, and tree branches, seems to crawl down the entrance wall like a garden vine. Like the curated space it inhabits, Liang’s piece is a collection of objects without any seemingly rational relationship existing in forced harmony, inorganic posing as organic. Through our rationalization of its existence, perhaps as commentary on the ubiquity of human-made ephemera now found in nature, Fit #9 becomes a part of the created scenery. Next to the piece, a slender window gives the visitor only a peek of what’s to come ahead. The curved path of the gallery’s hall forms the side of a square encompassing a circle, which is coincidentally a Chinese visual metaphor for heaven and earth, and a motif often present in Chinese gardens.

In the central rotunda, digital photographs by Robert Zhao Renhui depict desolate scenery, natural and invented, in which humanity is both participant and active creator. In Changi, Singapore (2010–2012), one is met with an image of three humans exploring a dune. Seemingly natural, the dunes are manmade, built up with sand imported from other Asian countries as part of Singapore’s land reclamation of the sea. Here, the pictured space vacillates from false to real, blurring the boundaries between what is perceived as wild and yet is actually tame, through a landscape made possible only by the destruction and relocation of another.

The exhibition, conceived by three distinct sociocultural and geographic landscapes—the Guangzhou-based Guangdong Times Museum, the San Francisco/Paris-based Kadist Art Foundation, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)—leaves one to ask, what constitutes a landscape? Is it a representation of a place or is it a space, like a garden, that we invent for our own comfort and enjoyment? Moreover, what might this mean for how we perceive and interact with nature? What might this mean for the fate of our planet?

Landscape: The Virtual, The Actual, The Possible? is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco through January 25, 2015.

Scott Norton holds a degree in History with a focus in Intellectual History and Art History of Europe and Asia. He currently works on projects concerning East Asian scholar traditions and the history of tea production in East Asia.

Robert Zhao Renhui/Institute of Critical Zoologists. Blind Long-Tailed Owl, Desert Variant of Little Owl from the series, As Walked on Water, 2011; installation of vinyl print; 280 cm x 194 cm.

Singapore-based artist Robert Zhao Renhui is the Institute of Critical Zoologists, an organization that, for any Doctor Who fans out there, would be the environmental analogue to the Torchwood Institute. The fictional Torchwood was founded to protect the Earth from supernatural and extraterrestrial threats; with that mandate in hand, its employees must remain open and unperturbed by myriad strange and uncanny possibilities within the universe. Shrouded in secrecy, however, its associates attempt to perpetuate the myth of everyday banality to keep their fellow human citizens free from fear. Although similarly invested in the strange zoological proclivities of our non-human fellows, the ICZ is not a secret society. It delves into the multifarious world around us to expose the strange assumptions  humanity takes for granted about its surrounding landscape. Working primarily as a photographer, Renhui blends fact and fiction to emphasize the idiosyncratic relations between animals, their habitats, and the humans that categorize them. While the result is ecologically minded,  the dominant effect is uncanny. The ICZ affectively unearths little-understood behavioral habits of animals and re-presents them within gallery settings as representational photography, encyclopedic texts, and multimedia installations. ICZ’s current exhibit, The Last Thing You See, is up at 2902 Gallery in Singapore until January 5 and examines the act of sight. By demonstrating the shift in perception that would result from a sensitivity to ultraviolet light, ICZ reveals a world familiar to insects and totally divorced from human experience. ICZ is going to appear in an upcoming series of shows I’m curating at Gallery 400 and La Box.