Associate Professor
Dr. Tobias Klein
SCM City University of Hong Kong
Mnemonic Landscapes
I“Country is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain,” wrote Du Fu, capturing the resilience of nature amidst the devastation wrought by the An Lushan Rebellion in 755. His poetic juxtaposition of ruin and endurance reflects the enduring relationship between humanity and nature. In the traditions of landscape art, this relationship has evolved across cultures. Chinese art has historically imbued landscapes with spiritual and philosophical significance, drawing on Daoist and Confucian traditions, while Western art explored the sublime and emotional resonance of nature only explicitly during theRomantic period. Historically, nature was revered, encoded with meaning, or subordinated to human purposes. However, in the wake of industrialization and environmental degradation, the resilience of nature, as envisioned by Du Fu, is now in question. This raises a critical challenge: how can humanity redefine its relationship with nature in the context of a post-industrial, digital age? Hong Kong, often perceived as a “concrete jungle,” serves as accompelling site for this exploration. While urban density and infrastructure dominate its landscape, remnants of nature persist in hybrid forms, blending the organic and the artificial. These environments prompt critical questions: what constitutes nature in a world where wilderness is curated, engineered, and controlled? From reclaimed land and concrete-clad slopes to synthetic playgrounds, the boundary between nature and artifice has blurred.Mnemonic Landscapes offers a contemporary response by articulating a “new digital nature” that reimagines landscapes through hybrid forms of representation. Departing from traditional landscape painting, which emphasized majestic vistas and hierarchical compositions, this project constructs unapologetic, non-hierarchical, and immersive landscapes. Mnemonic Landscapes is a kinetic artwork. Composed of five lenticular panels mounted on motorized swivels. Employing 3D-scanning LIDAR technology, natural elements from Hong Kong are digitally recomposed into a dense new form. The work resists traditional vistas, offering instead a dense, immersive experience of a post-natural memory—an unstable, treacherous ground that merges perception and imagination. The lenticular prints, which refract light and shift content according to the viewer’s perspective. This shifting and fluid experience invites viewers to explore a pixelated wilderness that destabilizes traditional notions of orientation and space. The resulting works are hybrid artifacts, existing simultaneously as real and artificial constructs that celebrate a 'digital wilderness' distinct from traditional conceptions of nature or untouched wilderness. The artworks themselves function as simulacra, imitating and reimagining nature in a response to humanity’s collective desire for control and idyllic preservation. Within curated urban environments, these digital landscapes act as disruptive elements, challenging the boundary between wilderness and park, reality and illusion. They provoke viewers to reconsider the fragility and malleability of these boundaries, suggesting that nature, once perceived as immovable and eternal, can also be fluid, ephemeral, and artificial. Mnemonic Landscapes embraces this ambiguity, capturing remote sites in Hong Kong to create digital compositions that destabilize traditional perceptions of wilderness. These works resist the idealized, sanitized tradition of landscape art, offering instead an experimental representation of a wilderness that challenges humanity’s tendency to subordinate nature.
BIO
Tobias Klein (簡鳴謙) is an internationally recognised Architect and Artist. His work articulates a syncretism of contemporary CAD/CAM technologies with site and culturally specific design narratives, intuitive non-linear design processes, as well as historical and cultural references.
Through his works and writings, he established the notion of Digital Craft as an operational synthesis between digital and physical materials and tools as poetic (Poïesis) and technical (Technê) expressions, opposing the traditional dualistic separation of digital workflows and analogue making and material understanding.
Klein has been extensively exhibited in several of the most relevant venues, including London Science Museum, the V&A Museum, the Venice Architectural Biennale, Ars Electronica, Melbourne’s Science Gallery, The Container (Tokyo) the Bellevue Arts Museum, the MoCA Taipei, the Museum of Vancouver and at Art Basel Hong Kong, among many others.
In 2020, The University Museum and Art Gallery, Hong Kong, opened a retrospective exhibition of some of his signature works from the past fifteen years, which was accompanied by a publication which shared the exhibitions title: “Metamorphosis or Confrontation”.
ARTWORK [3]
Procedural Echoes, 2025
<< previous | next >>
Dr. Tobias Klein
SCM City University of Hong Kong
Mnemonic Landscapes
I“Country is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain,” wrote Du Fu, capturing the resilience of nature amidst the devastation wrought by the An Lushan Rebellion in 755. His poetic juxtaposition of ruin and endurance reflects the enduring relationship between humanity and nature. In the traditions of landscape art, this relationship has evolved across cultures. Chinese art has historically imbued landscapes with spiritual and philosophical significance, drawing on Daoist and Confucian traditions, while Western art explored the sublime and emotional resonance of nature only explicitly during theRomantic period. Historically, nature was revered, encoded with meaning, or subordinated to human purposes. However, in the wake of industrialization and environmental degradation, the resilience of nature, as envisioned by Du Fu, is now in question. This raises a critical challenge: how can humanity redefine its relationship with nature in the context of a post-industrial, digital age? Hong Kong, often perceived as a “concrete jungle,” serves as accompelling site for this exploration. While urban density and infrastructure dominate its landscape, remnants of nature persist in hybrid forms, blending the organic and the artificial. These environments prompt critical questions: what constitutes nature in a world where wilderness is curated, engineered, and controlled? From reclaimed land and concrete-clad slopes to synthetic playgrounds, the boundary between nature and artifice has blurred.Mnemonic Landscapes offers a contemporary response by articulating a “new digital nature” that reimagines landscapes through hybrid forms of representation. Departing from traditional landscape painting, which emphasized majestic vistas and hierarchical compositions, this project constructs unapologetic, non-hierarchical, and immersive landscapes. Mnemonic Landscapes is a kinetic artwork. Composed of five lenticular panels mounted on motorized swivels. Employing 3D-scanning LIDAR technology, natural elements from Hong Kong are digitally recomposed into a dense new form. The work resists traditional vistas, offering instead a dense, immersive experience of a post-natural memory—an unstable, treacherous ground that merges perception and imagination. The lenticular prints, which refract light and shift content according to the viewer’s perspective. This shifting and fluid experience invites viewers to explore a pixelated wilderness that destabilizes traditional notions of orientation and space. The resulting works are hybrid artifacts, existing simultaneously as real and artificial constructs that celebrate a 'digital wilderness' distinct from traditional conceptions of nature or untouched wilderness. The artworks themselves function as simulacra, imitating and reimagining nature in a response to humanity’s collective desire for control and idyllic preservation. Within curated urban environments, these digital landscapes act as disruptive elements, challenging the boundary between wilderness and park, reality and illusion. They provoke viewers to reconsider the fragility and malleability of these boundaries, suggesting that nature, once perceived as immovable and eternal, can also be fluid, ephemeral, and artificial. Mnemonic Landscapes embraces this ambiguity, capturing remote sites in Hong Kong to create digital compositions that destabilize traditional perceptions of wilderness. These works resist the idealized, sanitized tradition of landscape art, offering instead an experimental representation of a wilderness that challenges humanity’s tendency to subordinate nature.
BIO
Tobias Klein (簡鳴謙) is an internationally recognised Architect and Artist. His work articulates a syncretism of contemporary CAD/CAM technologies with site and culturally specific design narratives, intuitive non-linear design processes, as well as historical and cultural references.
Through his works and writings, he established the notion of Digital Craft as an operational synthesis between digital and physical materials and tools as poetic (Poïesis) and technical (Technê) expressions, opposing the traditional dualistic separation of digital workflows and analogue making and material understanding.
Klein has been extensively exhibited in several of the most relevant venues, including London Science Museum, the V&A Museum, the Venice Architectural Biennale, Ars Electronica, Melbourne’s Science Gallery, The Container (Tokyo) the Bellevue Arts Museum, the MoCA Taipei, the Museum of Vancouver and at Art Basel Hong Kong, among many others.
In 2020, The University Museum and Art Gallery, Hong Kong, opened a retrospective exhibition of some of his signature works from the past fifteen years, which was accompanied by a publication which shared the exhibitions title: “Metamorphosis or Confrontation”.
ARTWORK [3]
Procedural Echoes, 2025
<< previous | next >>