Pleased to show Paradise Paradox, a commissioned painting displayed in the lobby of BlackRock’s Singapore headquarters.
Floating holy mountains drawn from the sacred geographies of Asia are peaks that have long symbolised transcendence. Places of retreat from the chaos of empire, commerce, and conquest; refuges where the enlightened could gaze down upon the illusions of the material world in splendid isolation. In a Met museum article I read, it described Chinese landscape paintings of mountains as symbols of the State and that ink painters were codifying their expressions and concerns about the State via the expressions of how they depicted the mountains.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, oversees more than $14 trillion in client assets (a figure larger than the GDP of nearly every nation on earth) and with that comes voting power exercised on behalf of millions of beneficial owners directing capital flows that shape economies, influence policy, and nudge destinies across continents. Whose heaven floats?
Floating Asian holy mountains watch silently, stood longer than humanity itself, witnesses within the threshold of the sacred and algorithmic, the divine being optimised for return. The traditional sublime’s power is for it to overwhelm us into a transcendent beauty, almost terrifying the human spirit to face a divine power. In this painting it isn’t nature that overwhelms but rather the technology creating Utopias and Dystopias at the speed of light via the movements of Capital; The Techno Sublime. If there is an overwhelming divine power within such a structure, what existential shape does it take form and what destiny does it have for our humanity.
Many thanks to Blackrock and Richard Koh Gallery for helping make this happen.