Eating the Mountain

“The landscape swallows us; we swallow the landscape.” In an era where landscapes steadily recede and identities drift across borders, the question of selfhood returns with renewed urgency: Who am I? Where do I come from? The exhibition Eating the Mountain takes its title from a rural Chinese idiom that once described a way of living in symbiosis with the land — a form of survival that was at once practical and poetic. Revisited today, this phrase transforms into a cultural metaphor, one that speaks to the intimate entanglement of food, soil, body, and memory in shaping our sense of belonging. Here, eating is not only an act of nourishment but also a way of perceiving the world. Through taste, we consume the earth itself; through language, we inherit the voices of our families; through scent, we recall the fragments of childhood. Yet the exchange is never one-sided. As much as we devour landscapes, they in turn consume us. Terrain, history, and forgotten terroirs imprint themselves upon the body, carving traces that resurface in memory and imagination. The mountain in this context is more than a topographical form. It is a site of cultural layering and bodily experience, a silent witness to migration and displacement, a fault line where languages fracture and histories remain unfinished. It represents both endurance and vulnerability — a symbol of the physical ground we inhabit and the emotional terrain we carry within. By bringing together artists working across media and disciplines, Eating the Mountain offers a space where these ideas converge. The exhibition encourages audiences to reflect on how acts of consuming and being consumed resonate within contemporary life. What does it mean to “swallow” a place, and what remains when the place itself swallows us? How might memory, taste, and landscape interweave into new narratives of identity in a world of shifting geographies? Presented in collaboration with the D & E Foundation (USA) — an institution dedicated to supporting cultural exchange and artistic diversity worldwide — the exhibition benefits from international recognition and resources, situating its inquiry within a global context.