At Perrotin’s London gallery, conceptual artist Laurent Grasso moves through a speculative terrain where human intervention unsettles the natural order of things and draws new horizons.
Some sixty-five kilometres southeast of mainland Taiwan lies a small volcanic island. Orchid Island, a name bestowed during the Japanese colonial period, carries with it the romanticised exoticism so characteristic of that era. Yet beneath its beauty lies a complex terrain—one shaped by overlapping histories, political tensions, and ecological fragility.
It is within this landscape that French artist Laurent Grasso frames his latest solo exhibition. Orchid Island, on view at Perrotin, London until 20 December, takes its leave from its eponym, but unfolds into something more universal; a convergence of the overlapping idylls of science, myth, history.
“I was initially searching for a kind of paradisiacal landscape through which I could address the historical representation of nature and the idealisation of it,” Grasso tells Elephant. While working on a separate project in Taipei, he began exploring the island more thoroughly—scouting potential sites for a new work—when he happened upon Orchid Island. “It immediately felt right,” he says, “a place that was not only visually striking but also politically and culturally layered.”
As in OttO (2018), filmed in Yuendumu, Australia, and exhibited at Perrotin’s Paris gallery, the central film to the exhibition, also titled Orchid Island (2023), sees the digital superimposition of ambiguous forms into otherwise tranquil landscapes. In OttO, hovering orbs of light represented the invisible and inaccessible spiritual realms of Aboriginal mythologies and beliefs. With Orchid Island, also indigenously populated, this motif evolves into the apparition of a levitating black rectangle, its movements measured as if surveilling and committing to memory a natural cartography of the land below.
Aerially-perceived, Orchid Island is an unspoiled terrain of arcadian beauty but this belies a disturbing reality; the presence of a government-run nuclear waste storage facility. “What appears as an untouched paradise is, in fact, corrupted by human and political forces,” Grasso says. The native Tao population, who depend heavily on the sea and land for their livelihood were neither consulted nor properly informed of the construction of the nuclear waste dump on their ancestral land.
As is often the case in Grasso’s work, the central filmic motif is mirrored in oil paintings comprising his Studies into the Past series. The latest addition feels distinctly ‘American,’ its Edenic grandeur and divine light evoking that of 19th-century Hudson River School landscapes. The framing of this work elevates the island to a realm of moral and spiritual significance, in keeping with the Romantic ideal of the Sublime. Yet this very illumination advances the narrative of settler colonialism, casting the wilderness as a frontier awaiting Euro-American—or in the case of Orchid Island, Chinese and Japanese—dominion while erasing the presence and agency of the Indigenous communities who continue to inhabit it.
“Looking to the past and referencing the history of art allows me to decontextualize the present,” says Grasso. “To open up another framework through which contemporary issues can be seen and felt differently. For me, the artist’s role is to create mechanisms through which we can understand the world anew.”
The black rectangle in Orchid Island operates within this logic. Colonial intrusion, UFO, artificial surveillance, oil spill, a nimbus foreboding? The symbolic potentialities remain endless. What concerns Grasso is that the incongruity of the abstract form in this setting creates a paradoxical encounter between two entities, natural and unnatural, past and future. A tension which he believes “opens a space for reflection on how we see, represent, and relate to the world around us.”
The exhibition as a whole, is structured as a speculative field. Beyond the Orchid Island works, Grasso applies his fascination with science fiction to imagine a future archive of nature shaped by mutation and memory. In Future Herbarium, a series of white bronze sculptures executed in the manner of 18th-century botanical herbariums, he records the fossilised remains of invented flora; diaphanous borage and sunflowers preserved as relics of a post-disaster ecology. Elsewhere, an oil painting of a cloud on palladium foil shimmers with artificial luminosity, its silvery surface an allusion to geoengineering practices like cloud seeding, where silver iodide is sprayed into the atmosphere to induce rain. These works share a quiet tension between fascination and unease — a surrealist paradox in which nature itself becomes an artifact of human invention.
Also belonging to this visual vocabulary is the sculpture Panoptès (2025), a new development in the artist’s inquiry into the surveillance gaze and the eye as an emblem of knowledge and vulnerability. At the end of exfoliated branches, eyes, like budding flowers, leer as you walk round the gallery space. For Grasso, the piece is a contraction of several stories like Argus Panoptes, a shepherd covered with a hundred eyes which kept watch of his flock or the myth of St Lucia. I’m particularly drawn to his mention of a book by Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think, which explores the idea that forests possess their own systems of communication and cognition. “I think this offering of the eyes naturally leads to ideas of control, surveillance, and the panopticon — concepts that feel very present in our contemporary condition.”
The boundaries between what we consider human and non-human, natural and artificial, are constantly shifting. Rooted in the histories and landscapes of Orchid Island, Grasso conjures overlapping fictions of science, nature and humanity, where legacies of the past meet speculative futures. It’s unsettling, yes, but enlightening too to think of what might exist beyond our perception and who may be watching. “What draws me to this kind of research is precisely that it expands our field of vision,” he reflects. “It reminds us that we are only a tiny fragment of a vast universe.”
Words by Millen Brown-Ewens
