{"id":3106,"date":"2025-04-03T21:51:46","date_gmt":"2025-04-03T21:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/03\/emma-webster-unveils-new-haunting-landscapes-at-perrotin-hong-kong\/"},"modified":"2025-04-03T21:51:46","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T21:51:46","slug":"emma-webster-unveils-new-haunting-landscapes-at-perrotin-hong-kong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/03\/emma-webster-unveils-new-haunting-landscapes-at-perrotin-hong-kong\/","title":{"rendered":"Emma Webster Unveils New Haunting Landscapes at Perrotin Hong Kong"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Paintings
An installation view of Emma Webster\u2019s exhibition \u201cVapors\u201d at Perrotin Hong Kong. Photo: Mengqi Bao, courtesy of Perrotin<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pushing the limits of figuration and abstraction and of fiction and fantasy in our relationship to nature, British-American artist Emma Webster<\/a> has embarked on an aesthetic, philosophical and spiritual examination of contemporary perceptions of landscape, navigating the slippery terrain between sensorial reality and digital manipulation. She debuted new works during Art Basel Hong Kong at Perrotin inspired by the desolate, arid landscapes of Pacific Palisades, which endured a record-breaking dry season last year. That extreme weather ultimately fueled the wildfires in Los Angeles<\/a>, devastating a fragile ecosystem and destroying her family\u2019s home.<\/p>\n

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Characterized by a dark haze and gloomy atmosphere, these bleak landscapes appear suspended in a liminal state of unsettling calm\u2014one that both precedes and follows apocalyptic disaster. The agitation roiling within the clouds is echoed in the swirling momentum of Webster\u2019s more abstract gestures, as if anticipating the impetuous eruption of catastrophic forces.<\/p>\n

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Emma Webster. Photo: Mack Breeden<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As Webster demonstrated with her iPad during our walkthrough, most of her paintings begin as digital studies of simulated environments\u2014worlds she constructs through digital renderings in virtual reality and occasionally translates into physical matter using 3D printing. She tends to use technology \u201cin a perverse way,\u201d first creating a sculpture and then scanning it back into a virtual form. The result is a recursive illusion of gravity, light and reality, as if this fictional simulacrum of nature could manifest sensorial presence.<\/p>\n

Seduced by material decisions, Webster admits to finding delight in the rendering of the light and textures that define this world-making process\u2014one that becomes a perfect platform with which to attempt to understand and translate the mystery of nature and its inexhaustible forces. Wrestling with the dialectical tension between embodiment and disembodiment, her representation of nature deliberately exceeds the boundaries of both tangible reality and the mind\u2019s invention. It moves beyond the logic of sensation and the science of matter, becoming both image and symbol.<\/p>\n

Webster\u2019s innovative use of VR, in particular, has allowed her to go further in terms of dimension, perception and immersion within the image and its experience. As she explains, working with the technology lets her manipulate light and texture freely, generating potentially infinite morphing possibilities of the same entity. \u201cIt activates a puzzle mentality,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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Webster has invented a wholly new genre of painting that blurs the boundaries between plein-air landscape, still-life and digital creations. Photo: Mack Breeden<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze<\/a> suggested, there are two ways to overcome figuration\u2014understood as both the illustrative and the narrative. One path moves toward abstraction; the other veers toward the \u201cfigure,\u201d conceived as a single nuclear entity that fuses sensitive form with emotional and psychical experience. In Webster\u2019s case, the result is an intentional, profoundly artificial reproduction of natural form that blurs the lines between plein-air landscape, still-life and some digital reality. Her fictitious environments, meticulously designed and staged, have never existed in life, yet they seem to possess an embedded psychological and spiritual charge animated by her abstract painterly gestures.<\/p>\n

Notably, as the depictions of nature become less and less real in their flattened 2D representation, the works themselves begin to provocatively confront our impulse to appropriate, objectify, instrumentalize and anthropomorphize the natural world. \u201cThey\u2019re scary because they\u2019re ominous,\u201d Webster told Observer. That raises the question: what exactly are we afraid of?<\/p>\n

Yet the next phase of Webster\u2019s process pulls these images back into the sensorial realm, into the soft, tactile matter of oil painting. She acknowledges that it becomes essential for her to carefully choreograph the light and construct a theatrical mise-en-sc\u00e8ne\u2014one that amplifies the drama while drawing the viewer deeper into the visual terrain.<\/p>\n

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On the canvas, however, spatial and volumetric cues collapse onto a single plane in an approach to landscape more aligned with Eastern pictorial traditions. Techniques like backlighting and underlighting\u2014borrowed respectively from the vocabularies of camera and theatre\u2014are strategies Webster adopts to sustain the illusion of a space that feels fictitious yet strangely probable. \u201cThey have a realistic light, a realistic appearance, but they\u2019re not part of this world,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

What emerges are densely layered canvases that grapple with the ecological crisis born of humanity\u2019s lopsided relationship with nature. For Webster, the complexity of the image is not only inevitable\u2014it\u2019s required to address the complexity of all things. From building shoebox dioramas to constructing full-scale VR worlds, she has come to see that complication is integral to understanding. \u201cI questioned how we make sense of the space and realized that it\u2019s about having this sense of muchness, complexity and stratification,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

Functioning as dystopic counterpoints to classical idylls, these ominous landscapes foresee a future for nature already marred by disconnection and degradation. Webster\u2019s paintings insist that environmental catastrophe is not impending\u2014it\u2019s already here. The \u201cvapor\u201d of disaster hovers with ghostly persistence above these desolate terrains, already stripped of vitality, already adrift without gravity.<\/p>\n

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At once sublime and sinister, Webster\u2019s worlds are inhabited by invented species that are oddly static and artificially disproportioned. Photo: Mengqi Bao, courtesy of Perrotin<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the same time, Webster engages in a continuous shift of scale, a deliberate strategy that forces the viewer to reorient\u2014or at least question\u2014the point of view we adopt in our contemplation and conception of nature. Even the birds and animals she introduces as characters in these scenes are pure inventions: entirely new species conjured without reference. As we moved from painting to painting, she confessed that she didn\u2019t even allow herself to google the real thing before painting these uncanny forms. They\u2019re intentionally static, artificially disproportioned\u2014awkward constructs, a kind of nature already rendered as distorted artifice. As she explains, painting offers a space where species can exist without being subject to survival or adaptation, which are always tethered to functionality and logic.<\/p>\n

It is precisely the virtuosity and virtuality of these images that hold them in suspension, caught between earthbound, celestial and aquatic dimensions. Subtle manipulations of light, scale and sensorial perception fracture the logic of realism, crafting instead a more theatrical world\u2014one that stages a mysterious, near-mystic return to our primordial relationship with nature. The inexplicability of this constructed environment invites a renewed sense of reverence, a form of veneration that modernity has all but lost.<\/p>\n

In this sense, Webster\u2019s work carries the same gravitational pull toward the sublime as defined by Romanticism\u2014an intricate weave of terror and awe that compels us to confront our own insignificance, our powerlessness in the face of nature\u2019s inexorable forces. And yet, it also gestures toward a kind of spiritual elevation, a call to attune ourselves more deeply to the unceasing flow of those same energies. Her landscapes become part of an alchemical cycle\u2014of creation and destruction\u2014in which we are not separate but already embedded.<\/p>\n

\"Paintings\"Paintings
Digitally sculpted and then rendered in oil, Webster\u2019s landscapes don\u2019t reproduce vistas from real life but rather manifest worlds from the artist\u2019s imagination. Photo: Mengqi Bao, courtesy of Perrotin<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Webster\u2019s goal is not simply to create but to channel images\u2014visions that both warn of possible futures should we fail to shift our paradigm and reveal reality\u2019s inherently fluid, shapeshifting nature. \u201cThe paintings offer something solid, but the world is continuously shifting.\u201d<\/p>\n

While her works begin with a deliberate, carefully composed rendering of reality, she eventually surrenders to the unpredictable logic of image-making, leaving room for intuition and accident to intervene\u2014moments that can catalyze sudden, transformative epiphanies. \u201cThere are a lot of really loose decisions that happen when I\u2019m making the painting itself,\u201d she added. \u201cI mean, there\u2019s mistakes that happen, there\u2019s good things that happen. All this improvisation and intuition allow sudden revelations as images manifest in the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no surprise, then, that a spiritual dimension to the work inevitably surfaces as the artist discusses the unseen forces animating her process. \u201cI think painting is a spiritual act. You don\u2019t know what is coming out until the end. You have to surrender to it. It\u2019s a bit of divination.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s precisely this attitude that lends her images their quiet universality. They become visual expressions of the eternal human impulse to approach the mysteries of nature\u2014to reach toward something deeper in our relationship with the world around us, our place within it and the transitory, ever-shifting essence of all things. \u201cI learned to take a step back and acknowledge that it\u2019s not about me,\u201d Webster said. \u201cIt\u2019s about something else, a collective unconscious or some universal force.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A\"A
Webster\u2019s use of VR lets her move light and adjust texture and form to visualize infinite possibilities. Photo: Mack Breeden<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For Webster, the act of creation is itself a form of spiritualism. \u201cComing from a very scientific family, it has been funny to discover that I can play with that,\u201d she said, reflecting that this idea of \u201cplaying God\u201d\u2014the imaginative exercise of world-building through painting\u2014is not about mimicking reality. It\u2019s closer to the gesture of cave paintings: a ritualistic, symbolic practice meant to conjure and access a magical, vital dimension of existence that lies beyond the reach of human logic and linear time.<\/p>\n

In Webster\u2019s practice, the integration of new technologies paradoxically allows for a return to something ancient and elemental\u2014a primordial connection with the cyclical forces of nature. Consciously surrendering to the process of the unconscious, she engages in a universal existential and spiritual inquiry: a confrontation with what Martin Heidegger called thrownness<\/i>. As he described it, humans are \u201cthrown\u201d into existence without consent and must navigate meaning and authenticity from within that condition, reconciling the inborn germ of wholeness with the external, often uncontrollable, movements of fate.<\/p>\n

Emma Webster\u2019s \u201cVapors<\/a>\u201d is on view at Perrotin Hong Kong through May 17.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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