Iranian artist Shahpour Pouyan opens a solo show at Copperfield gallery in London this week. The show—titled Wūshuǐ, which translates to “poisoned landscape”—draws connections with political ideology and depiction of the landscape. The title is also “a bastardization of the Chinese phrase Shan Shui or ‘mountain water,’ a style of landscape painting in Taoist painting tradition that refers to ideas of purity”. In his works we see landscape paintings ripped and torn, exposing the wooden structures upon which they hang, as well as appropritations of different landscape painting styles—from nineteenth-century Persian techniques, to the “Sunday painting” style of Winston Churchill.
