X Collection 404 When Landscapes Draw Near

From May 24 to August 16, 2026, X Museum presents 'X Collection 404: When Landscapes Draw Near, ' its fifth collection exhibition, which focuses on landscape as a classic pictorial subject and brings together 47 recent works by 46 Chinese and international contemporary artists. The exhibition showcases painting as the primary medium while encompassing sculpture and photography, alongside related materials, publications, and artist interview videos. Organized into five sections, the exhibition explores, through different themes and visual threads, how landscape has shifted in contemporary artistic practice from natural scenery toward a richer pictorial language, renewing its forms of expression, ways of seeing, and artistic meaning.

The title 'When Landscapes Draw Near' responds to the ongoing transformation of landscape as a subject in Western art history, particularly in painting and related artistic practices, as well as to its changing relationship with the viewer: rather than referring simply to a natural scene waiting to be depicted, landscape has become a creative medium through which artists work with perception and memory, and address local experience as well as broader conditions of reality. The works that emerge from this shift bring the audience into another way of encountering landscape; when familiar scenes appear in the work with few human figures or traces of human activity, assuming an almost purified presence, they no longer function as extensions of everyday vision, but instead gain a presence of their own through the structure, scale, and atmosphere of the work, actively drawing near to the viewer. The title also points to a key transformation of landscape across different artistic traditions: having long entered images as a background for religious narratives, conventional views, or forms of spiritual projection, landscape gradually moved beyond these supporting functions and acquired an independent position within visual representation.

Following this trajectory, the exhibition unfolds across five sections through different approaches: landscape first enters the field of vision as expansive views of nature and the city, before turning toward the more immediate sensations produced by surrounding objects and scenes; as the act of viewing deepens, it is further reconstructed through abstract forms, visual structures, and shifts in medium, taking on new forms. Coastal scenes and window views then serve as two specific settings that alter the representation of familiar scenes, allowing landscape to move between surreal imagery, dreamlike atmosphere, and spatial rhythm. In the exhibition galleries, the audience is invited to move through a process of recognition, approach, and renewed understanding, in which landscape not only extends our perception of the real world, but also becomes a more open field of visual imagination and sensory experience; it no longer simply passes before the eye, but opens onto a sustained process of looking and reflection.

The participating artists come from 13 countries and were born between 1940 and 2000, spanning several generations; as their diverse geographic backgrounds, life experiences, and artistic trajectories intersect throughout the exhibition, landscape begins to trace subtle connections between individual experience and the wider conditions of their time, while carrying traces of both personal and collective life. When these works are brought together in the galleries, landscape once again reveals its long-standing and profound relationship with human experience, for the ways we depict and interpret the external world also reflect a deeper comprehension of our own position and cultural context. In this sense, landscape continues to sustain its vitality as a classic subject, offering artists a means to reconsider their surrounding realities and their own ways of seeing, while inviting the audience, through these works, to reflect on how we look at landscape and how landscape shapes our understanding of the world we inhabit.