A a woman stands majestically on a rocky, icy precipice; she looks out over a vast frosty expanse covered in thick, flawless snow. Her back is turned to us, the mood is contemplative. She surveys her domain, back straight and black hair licking the back of her head.
This is a photograph by a UK-based Chinese artist Jan Wang Preston. But there is another version of this image, a famous romantic painting by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich. It is titled Wanderer above the sea of fogmade around 1817. In this work, a clothed man with flaming hair Rückenfigur (man seen from behind) standing on jagged ridge gazing at misty landscape; the painting is the epitome of 19th century liberalism and romanticism, the lone figure in the stark landscape contemplating his place in the world.
This was the age of the great expeditioners, colonialism and the marking of territory, and it is impossible to see the picture now and not feel the figure’s claim to the land below.
Wang Preston’s subversive reworking of Friedrich offers a different relationship to the land. Hanging in the window of Messums Gallery in Londonentry point for her exhibition Three easier pieces. In her version of the image, the figure (the artist herself) is naked – buttocks exposed to the sub-zero temperatures of the South Pennines where the picture was taken. Wang Preston stood there as long as he could stand (10 minutes).
Part portrait, part witness In this solo extended performance (which will be repeated, with other people, for the rest of the year), the raw discomfort Wang Preston feels while standing naked in the snow, she said, is similar to what she feels as a Chinese woman encountering the exotic female nude bodies in canonical Western paintings. Instead of a promise of dominance, Wang Preston’s naked wanderer offers endurance and symbiosis with the land. Following the trajectory of ecofeministsWang Preston frames her “exotic” body in the landscape to indicate the way both have been degraded and dominated by the male gaze.
Clever and succinct reversals of art history continue in the exhibition, where Wang Preston does a lot in several large, lavish photographic reconstructions. There is great respect for Zhang Juan’s work since 1995 To add one meter to an anonymous mountain, in which 10 young Chinese artists lay naked on top of each other in protest. Wang Preston resumed work in Lancashire in August 2021 – after a year of lockdown – with local volunteers from all backgrounds. Gathering naked in nature was an act of liberation and solidarity; Wang Preston’s re-staging reads as both a celebration of diversity and a critique of British society and the bodies it excludes.
In three glorious performances of Manet’s Olympia, Wang Preston poses again nude as Manet’s model Victorine Meurent playing Olympia, then as Laure, the Black Maid who serves her, switching roles with a white male model—only when Wang Preston settles into Laure’s role, she doesn’t look with love Olympia, but stares at the camera again. Presented in opposition to one another, the effects of nudity, pose, and gaze play with the power dynamics inherent in the original image. A third version omits the figures as ellipsis, allowing us to understand how the staging and details of this work fit into this pictorial ideal of modernity, which equates the bodies of prostitutes and enslaved people with the luxurious, exotic flowers and fabrics that surround them.
Wang Preston transforms Manet’s bouquets according to Chinese floral traditions to reveal the connection between the history of the peony (the star of Manet’s bouquet, a sought-after and expensive flower in the 19th century) and slavery. The first tree peony was imported from China to Britain in 1789 – shortly before the breadfruit tree was exported to Jamaica from Tahiti to feed enslaved sugar plantation workers. Both projects were led by the English botanist Joseph Banks – which supplies most of the plants for Kew Gardens.
Previous works by Preston have dealt with the complexities of migration through the literal entanglement of roots – plants that are considered ‘non-native’ but which thrive despite their new conditions, and how colonialism has been implicated in the categorization of plant life, deciding what is ‘wild’ ‘ or ‘weed’ as part of a project of dominance and control. Yet plants, like bodies, do not always obey—they weave into natural ecologies, create hybrids, and flourish.
This new collection of works is a more direct, confrontational and bold look at the relationship between land and bodies. Using photography to reconstruct iconic paintings has been done before – but Wang Preston does it with precision, confidence and clarity. This exhibition is also about a woman standing on the ground, against the elements, in the face of an environment that is often hostile to her body. But if history is made in images – it can also be remade in images.
