Also published on 22 May 2025 on Hey SoCal

Mansheng Wang works on “Without Us.” | Photo courtesy of Mansheng Wang/The Huntington

“Wang Mansheng: Without Us,” an immersive installation that explores the interconnections between humans, flora, and fauna through contemporary art and classical concepts of nature, unveiled at The Huntington on May 17. On view through Aug. 4, 2025 in the Studio for Lodging the Mind 寓意齋 – a gallery within The Huntington’s renowned Chinese Garden – the exhibition features 22 hand-painted delicate silk panels that invite visitors to enter a luminous, meditative landscape.

Created by Mansheng Wang, the 2025 Cheng Family Foundation Visiting Artist in the Chinese Garden, the paintings in traditional and black walnut ink depict intricate scenes of trees, rocks, water, and other natural elements – some inspired by The Huntington’s Chinese Garden, Liu Fang Yuan 流芳園, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance.

The panels – arranged in singles, diptychs, triptychs, and a quadtych – are Wang’s vision of the natural world. Suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, they invite visitors to animate the installation as they walk around and become part of the landscape.

Wang isn’t a stranger to the Chinese Garden at The Huntington; he has participated in several calligraphy shows, but this is his first solo exhibition at the gallery. During a walkthrough of the installation, he recounts his initial conversation with Phillip E. Bloom – curator of the exhibition, the June and Simon K.C. Li Curator of the Chinese Garden, and the director of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies – his vision for the installation, and his work process.  

“In 2020, Phillip invited me to be The Huntington’s Visiting Artist at the Chinese Garden and I was thrilled!” began Wang. “I like to put my hands in the soil and I’ve been gardening almost 30 years. Coming to The Huntington for the first time about 10 years ago felt like being in heaven; I was so jealous of all the gardeners who work in this beautiful place.”

“Phillip was already familiar with my work, which is primarily about nature,” continues Wang. “Doing a larger-scale project was something we had discussed for some time, but everything was delayed by the pandemic. That extra time actually allowed me space to think and prepare. In early 2024, Phillip confirmed that an exhibition would be possible, so I wrote a proposal for an installation with silk panels. He liked the idea, and we introduced it to the Huntington exhibition team.”

The exhibition’s title comes from a unique perspective. Wang explains, “’Without Us’ imagines a world without humans. Of course, gardens are man-made. I’d visited the Huntington several times over the years to study its rich variety of trees and plants. ‘Without Us’ includes inspiration from these wonderful collections but the work’s scope is broader in that it incorporates my experiences in traveling and hiking in many different places.” 

“Right before working on this exhibition, I did a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” relates Wang. “Because of the pandemic I couldn’t bring the paintings back to China to mount them so the works were displayed on unmounted silk. And that sparked the idea to use transparent silk and hang the paintings in the middle of the gallery to make it more interesting.”

“To prepare for this installation, I created a small model of the works,” Wang says further. “I chose very thin silk so visitors can view the paintings from both sides – it created an extra angle to view nature. I used narrow, tall panels for mountain peaks and broader sets for a lotus pond or an expanse of woods and hills. You walk in and view an almost three-dimensional landscape and see details – tress, plants, animals, insects, birds. Some are from a distance, like the lake and a far-away mountain. Because of the light there’s slight movement, making the installation magical and dreamlike. ”                     

He transformed his Hudson Valley studio to prepare and work on the paintings. Describes Wang, “I built a large wall with moving wood panels so I could change the size of the board. Then I installed metal sheets on the wood and covered them with silk canvas. I used magnet to keep the silk in place because its thin and slippery. I hadn’t used much silk in my work until recently so I took notes and wrote my experience – like how the brush felt on it. Most of the time I worked on the wall, but I used too much ink and it would drip and stain the wall. So I would sometimes move the canvas on a large table.”  

“The work also required me to step back at least ten feet away after a few brushstrokes – even after adding just two leaves to it. I used three ladders with various height to reach different areas; I had to keep going up and down the ladder and stepping back to view the whole picture. I put in a lot of steps, it was like working out in the gym,” Wang says with a chuckle.

Originally, Wang planned to paint 28 panels, but he had to scale it down to 22 to fit the gallery space and allow visitors sufficient distance to view the artworks. He started thinking about what he wanted to paint and began practice work in 2020. But the actual painting only commenced in 2024 and ended early this year.

The first two panels in the exhibition are his tribute to the silkworm. Enlightens Wang, “This is the first painting I worked on in 2022. It’s called ‘The Silkworm and the Mulberry Tree’ and is my homage to the silkworm. The silk industry is a major component of China’s economy. Chinese people have been writing on silk for 6,000 years and this material is very valuable to them – it’s their source of livelihood.”

Visitors to the gallery will walk around the silk panels as they would on a trail leading up to the peak of the mountain. Wang says, “After you hike through the landscape and walk up this mountain, you think you’ve reached the summit. But there are more peaks beyond and you see a cascading waterfall, creating a large body of water and running through all the 22 panels in different forms – a smaller waterfall, stream, creek, lake, and even the mist on the mountain.” 

‘Without Us’ is Wang’s exhortation for us to consider the consequences of our actions – the harm they inflict on our planet. “When I was little we were taught that we are superior beings because we can make tools,” expounds Wang. “As I got older, I realized how the growth of technology gives humans greater power to cause damage to nature. While we used shovels and saws before, we can now utilize machines to cut down a 200-year-old tree in minutes. Even more worrying is that we’re able to create nuclear weapons which could ultimately destroy ourselves and this earth.”

Through his exhibition Wang also wants to remind us of the importance of water and conserving this precious resource. He declares, “These plants and animals are what makes earth special – and it’s all because of water. It’s what nourishes us and keeps all these beautiful things in nature alive. But people are the ones using it the most – we drink it, we cook our food, we take showers, we flush our toilets, we wash our cars, and so on. And we all know that California has constant water shortage and is prone to drought. On top of that, we pollute the water.”

On the walls of the gallery, visitors will find excerpts copied from Wang’s calligraphy taken from classical Chinese literature, featuring the writings of scholars, poets, and philosophers, including Confucius 孔子 (551–479 BCE), Zhuangzi 莊子 (4th century BCE), and Laozi 老子 (6^th century BCE). Many of the passages refer to the ancient Chinese concept of guan 觀 – to observe and appreciate nature by emptying the mind and allowing the natural world to enter.

“As you walk through the space, you get a different angle to look in and view the area,” explains Wang. “I hope people who come to see the paintings also read the texts to enjoy and be inspired by. Moreover, the texts provide viewpoints from which to observe the paintings.”     

Lastly, Wang clarifies, “Although the title of this piece is ‘Without Us,’ many people were involved. They encouraged me along the way and helped with the details needed to realize this project, from the curatorial team to the preparators and installation team to the registrars, security staff, and many more. I am grateful for their enthusiasm, support, and guidance.”

Mansheng Wang joins a remarkable company of visiting artists in The Huntington’s program, as Bloom reveals when he speaks about the initiative. “In 2012 we received a gift from the Cheng Family Foundation to endow a program to bring in artists to the Chinese Garden every year or two to create a new work in response to the site. We have hosted musicians, playwrights, performance artists, and now painters. The most recent before Mansheng was someone named Zheng Bo, who is a performance artist. He created a series of exercises and led visitors in doing them in the garden.”

Suspending artworks from the ceiling isn’t something totally new, discloses Bloom. “It’s the first time we’re hanging artworks from the ceiling but in our last exhibition called ‘Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China,’ we had a reproduction of an artwork hang from the ceiling but it served more as a spatial divider. That was the first time we used this hanging system, which was practice for this installation. Our experts knew what to do.”

Asked if an artist is given a mandate on what to create, Bloom replies, “Each time is different. Of course, we have some sense of the artist’s work beforehand. Through a series of conversations, we come up with a project. The one major exception was when we commissioned an artist specifically to make a video that’s permanently on display in the restaurant in the garden, but which we’ve also shown in some exhibitions. In this case, Mansheng and I came up with a project that would fit the gallery.”                                                                             

“Mansheng has a very scholarly approach to painting, which I admire,” pronounces Bloom. “He knows the history of painting so well, and he responds to art history in very thoughtful ways in his works. Visually, I love the sense of dynamism in his paintings of rocks and trees, which he creates in part by using brushes that he himself makes from reeds. But most importantly, perhaps, he and his wife Helena Kolenda are wonderful people. It is very pleasant to work with them, and to talk with them about art, nature, and society.”

“We have been discussing this project for about five years, so I had some sense of what the project would involve,” Bloom states. “He sent me updates regularly on his progress, including photos and videos. I was amazed by the detail of the works as well as by how completely they immerse a viewer. But it was not until we installed them in the gallery that I really could feel how successful and compelling ‘Without Us’ actually is.”

Bloom expresses what he thinks people will find engaging about the silk panels. “I think visitors will be struck by how beautiful the installation is. When you enter the gallery, it almost feels as though you have entered a lantern. The silk is so perfectly illuminated, and the light interacts with the ink and silk in such striking ways.”

“But more importantly, as visitors actually take time to look at the panels, they really will feel as though they are walking through a pristine, natural paradise – a world that humans have not disturbed. However, by walking through the panels, visitors themselves will disturb that world: the panels sway in response to visitors’ movement,” concludes Bloom. “I think it is impossible not to interact with this artwork without reflecting simultaneously on how spectacular nature is and how deeply we humans are intertwined with it.”