At Beetles + Huxley, China’s Yellow River Winds its Way to London

Shan shui, a Chinese word denoting landscape or topography, breaks down into something akin to “mountain-water,” a composite word that understands the physical world from a slightly different perspective than traditional Western-style landscape art. For Chinese photographer Kechun Zhang, the physical world shifts between the meanings inherent to both landscape and shan shui. A solo exhibition of his work, currently on view at Beetles + Huxley in London, features images that oscillate between a view of the physical world as a vulnerable realm impacted by the desires and exploits of civilization, but also as an overwhelming force to be reckoned with.

Shot with a large-format Linhof camera and deliberately overexposed, Zhang’s “Yellow River” series is infused with quiet unrest and uneasy serenity. His photographs of the river—the length of which he traversed, pilgrim-like, over the course of several years on a fold-up bicycle—document the physical features and human-influenced parameters of the river, but they also look beyond these aspects to something less tangible. Largely taken on overcast days, the photographs have a muted palette, emphasized by the river’s famously silted waters, which are prone to devastating floods.