Exhibition · Alisan Fine Art · New York
Alisan Fine Arts is pleased to present Ephemeral Ground, an exhibition that features three artists from across the globe. Their work nevertheless shares investigations into ephemerality, the passage of time, and humanity’s changing relationship to the landscapes that surround us. Despite their distinct visual languages, the works of Mark Baugh-Sasaki (San Francisco), Pan Caoyuan (Hangzhou), and Yeoh Choo Kuan (Kuala Lumpur) reveal an underlying exploration of liminal spaces, navigating the fluid boundaries between place and time. Mark Baugh-Sasaki’s practice examines the influence of cultural, historical, and geological forces on our perception of landscape—and, in turn, how those landscapes shape our understanding of ourselves. The Present Throws Its Shadow was made at the height of the pandemic, the same season in which Mark Baugh-Sasaki welcomed his daughter into the world and the 2020 wildfires burned across California. In a time of great stress and upheaval, his world shifted overnight. Places that had long offered peace and respite were drastically changed by fire, a jarring reconfiguration of the landscape he knew. As he contemplated what had been lost, Baugh-Sasaki began to question his expectations of the terrain, and how much of that assumption was shaped by perception rather than by the land itself. The work comprises a length of wood bent under the weight of a stone, which was gathered from the Carson River within the burn area of the Tamarack Fire. The stone hovers just above a container of earth from the same site, a location Baugh-Sasaki has long been connected to. He often sees the bowed wood as a reflection of himself: flexible under the weight of circumstance, reshaped by it. The stone carries the psychological gravity of the event. It remains suspended over the soil, at once a part of and forever separated from the earth. “In this suspension, the work holds the memory of what was lost, the current state of the place, and its uncertain future.…