‘Each landscape, no matter how calm and lovely, conceals a substratum of disaster’.
Robert Smithson
The book is a choreography of the Isle of Grain.
A land dweller from here
To elsewhere.
From vigorous summer to another severe winter.
Nothingness Beyond Blossom is a summer landscape book of the Isle of Grain, an extension of the winter book, Another Borderland. The landscape here is deeply engaged with not only time but seasons – it is a landscape in flux. To situate myself here is not only about embedding myself into the Isle of Grain but reflecting on it through every moment in flux. Following the changes in the external environment, the way this is perceived is also changeable. Therefore, Nothingness Beyond Blossom is an artist’s book which responds to the faded military landscape through the temporality of the seasons.
Nothingness Beyond Blossom is inspired by the coating of sugar-like blossom scattered on the land, which softens war-time traces with the colourful flourish of nature. This landscape book produced as spring turns to summer explores the scarred landscape of the Isle of Grain through material archives. Exploring conditions of absence and presence via a series of excavations, and guided by on-site materialities and movements, Nothingness Beyond Blossom unfolds landscape memories embedded in this faded military terrain. These excavations reveal the blurred traces of war ruins etched into the blossomed trenches. Following spring comes summer, a transitional moment where the land comes alive and where the military traces become even lighter. However, when summer is over, the scars will be revealed again in the severeness of winter.
Chia-Ying Chou was born in Taiwan and is currently based in London. She holds a Bachelors in Architecture from Chung Yuan Christian University in Taiwan (equivalent with RIBA Part 1 and 2) and completed Situated Practice MA with distinction in 2022. Her career moves back and forth between different disciplines, so that it is hard to define herself as a single identity. Her works try to find an anchor in the blurred boundaries ‘in-between’ city, nature, politics, and social contexts. Re-definitions and temporality are the two spirits guiding her practice. Instead of pursuing the timeless eternity of art, she expresses her point of view by re-defining the flux of situations in highly changeable societies. Her works move through diverse methodologies, such as illustration, essay films, photography, soundscape and artists book formats.
While attending the Bartlett, she was introduced to site-writing through the Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing module taught by Jane Rendell, David Roberts and Polly Gould, where she has started her current practice, in the Of{f} Borderlands Series, which focuses on the blurred borderland between her motherland Taiwan and her assigned official country China. She reflects in this liminality through the faded military landscape of the UK, which reveals the fragile future of Taiwan and the issue that everywhere is at war.
A book without a language as a sculpture unfolds the temporality of Grain and the materiality of the war condition, shaped by the earth.
The unpleasant salty sea flavour, the fragrance of fresh earth and even the unspeakable smell of paper pulp might exude from pages as we read it.
The book narrated by the earth reveals the potential of another archive.
It addresses the scars remembered by the ground, that have not disappeared, merely become lighter, in the faded military landscape of the Isle of Grain here and now, and borderlands of somewhere from the future.
Meanwhile, the project unfolds the multiplicities of sites of art between archive, sculpture, and book.
Francis Alys, Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic. (2007). Exhibition and Publication.
Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field,’ October, 8, (1979). Essay.
Jorge Otero-Pailos, The Ethics of Dust (2016). Artwork.
