CFHILL is proud to present another snapshot of one of the hottest art scenes in the world right now. We recently invited our Stockholm audience to familiarise themselves with the dynamic Los Angeles scene in an exhibition that was also curated by Melanie Lum, an art advisor and curator who served a key role in building multi-billionaire Budi Tek’s art collection, which is on display at his YUZ Museum in Shanghai. For Mountains and Streams, Melanie Lum has teamed up with her long time collaborator Beijing-based art advisor and curator Shi Zheng. This exhibition will be the fifth exhibition at CFHILL in recent times to highlight one of the current hot spots of the art world. Our previous zeitgeist-inspired exhibitions have touched down in places like New York, Tel Aviv, and London.

The seven participating artists Gao Weigang, Shi Zhiying, Yang Yongliang, Zheng Chongbin, You Jin, Yin Zhaoyang, and Zheng Lu were all born in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and are some of the most in-demand and widely discussed artists right now, both in China and on the international scene. It feels incredible to be able to show their work to you here!

We certainly love our natural landscapes in Sweden. In a way, we think of this love as the very essence of Swedishness. But it wasn’t always this way. On the contrary, in the past, we tended to regard nature as something that needed to be conquered and tamed. Storms, spring-time oods, deadly cold, and stony soil that kept the threat of famine ever-present. It wasn’t until the dawn of modernity, at the close of the 19th century, that the idea of nature as a source of tranquillity and freedom of thought began to take hold. As usual, the Chinese were way ahead of us Scandinavians. Over a millennium ago, the court culture in the Middle Kingdom was so sophisticated and arti cial that the scholar-administrators who worked for the emperor developed a longing to be free of all the arti ce, regulation, and con nement that surrounded them. A romantic notion of the poetic, placid majesty of landscapes began to emerge. This dream of another life became a concept, “shan shui”, or “mountains and streams”, which continues to feed artists energy and inspiration to this day. This is perhaps not too surprising when you consider the frantic pace at which Chinese society is changing. As actual, physical space becomes a scarcity, the gaze turns inwards, towards a world without any such limitations. Here, artists are free to recreate and invent spaces full of beauty and unrestrained shapes.