5. Yuan Shun’s own type of ecological art – cycle between the destruction of the model and the images of memory for the future
The performance of the modelbuilding, which takes the four elements earth, water, fire and air as its points of origin is retained, in many ways “preserved” in the image, which creates for itself a memory from mechanic construction and movement, and not from a computed process in a computer image. The destruction of the model after recording it understands itself as a creative act, as a stimulation of an organic cycle by self-immersion in meditation. The artist himself has pointed to the Buddhist approach of Samadhi (meditation: leaving the body) while in a state of self-immersion.
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Are, then, Yuan Shun’s images of a landscape inside his “Mind-scapes” to be understood as destroyed nature, or as futurist gardens? “Vision: The World as Garden“ was an image, which the above-mentioned ancestors of the artistic-ecological movement, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, employed as a comprehensive metaphor for the world exhibition EXPO 2000 in Hanover. They further described this image in a book called “Green Landscapes”, which was part of the subject series for the EXPO 2000. Their project of a futurist garden created via a green landscape network is specifically geared to Europe, which they regard as a kind of peninsula. Yuan Shun’s landscapes, too, evoke in their desert-likeness such gardens of the future. May his photographed and then destroyed models be discernible as projection screens or projection reliefs, or as battlefields, or as Mandalas (points of meditative focus), or as transit stations – his inventions certainly are journeys, from one place to another, from the past into the present, from a world close to us to a distant one, maybe even from one star to the next as, before Yuan Shun did, Antoine de Saint-Exupery so poetically conjured up in his musings of the world and the journey to other stars from the perspective of “The Little Prince.”
Munich, February 9th, 2007
Elmar Zorn
【编辑：小红】
