Visions beyond the Void, Whispers from the Hollow
2025.8.5-2025.10.26
Artist： CHENG JIALIANG
curtor：wang yanjun
In the Ming dynasty, atop Jilong Mountain once stood Pingxu Pavilion (the Pavilion Upon the Void)—built against the cliff, open and unshattered, and counted among the famed Forty-Eight Views of Jinling. Like later Wanshou Pavilion (the Pavilion of Longevity) and Beiji Pavilion (the Pavilion of Polaris), it has long vanished—but perhaps that matters no more. We so often fix our eyes upon hollow projections in the dense forest of reality, much like listening to whispers from the hollow, hoping to grasp—or to tear open—a deeper and more distant view. Perhaps this, too, is what a contemporary art museum can offer—no more and no less.
Cheng Jialiang is, of course, intimately familiar with Jilong Mountain. As a modest hill that once guarded the northern edge of the city and served as a site for observing the heavens, it holds layers of historical traces—from the Ancient Observatory, Jiming Temple, Literary Museum, and the Ten Temples, to the Republican-era meteorological station, T.V. Soong’s villa, and the Academia Sinica, and onward to today’s Beiji Pavilion Park and the Geological Museum—even the art museum that now emerges from within an old air-raid shelter. Yet to us locals, it is more than just a case study in artificial nature or a backdrop for discussing technological strata—it is a hillside we walk, live with, and share in the quiet routines of daily life.
Behind the ever-crowded Jiming Temple, the ruins of Zhenwu Temple and Beiji Pavilion lie crumbling and unseen, while the Ancient Observatory and the Villa are rarely open to the public. We often find ourselves circling the mountaintop’s enclosing walls, wandering down one dead-end dirt path after another, stumbling upon doodled sea turtles on the ground, faux-antique air vents, veteran bird photographers, fortune-tellers tucked beneath the steps, and an improvised gym hidden in the garden of stone carvings. The elderly men exercising along the mountain paths love to ask, “Guess how old I am?” “Seventy-five—hard to tell, right? Gotta keep moving.” And if you replied, “I bet you’re 800,” would you be slipping into one of those classic tales of encountering an immortal? Fifteen centuries on, no matter how power lines and municipal development reshape its form, Jilong Mountain still seems cloaked in a suspicious, lingering mist. And our fascination with rumor and distortion may well be a fascination with escape—or transcendence—just like the impulse to disappear into a Decathlon store when you’re already late for work.
This project stems from all the daydreams and bafflements accumulated on Jilong Mountain—three video works spun from two evolving tales, along with fragments of evidence and giveaway traces, scattered like stray whispers throughout a man-made hollow cut off from reality. Though filmed in the actual Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art and forested areas of Nanjing, with actors mostly drawn from the city’s creative circle, all characters, events, and texts are entirely fictional—half the absurd overtime jokes only art workers will understand, and the other half the cryptic rural fantasies one might stumble upon outside their own front door. If it all seems too obscure, feel free to treat it as a summer overtime simulator—perhaps even take a catnap in the cave, as if on a quiet lunch break.
In the end, it is through the hollow that we gaze beyond; and from the hollow, the whispers come.