Jingyuan Zhao

My practice is about exploring the wilderness. Wilderness has a deceptive concreteness at first glance. The difficulty is that while the word is a noun it acts like an adjective. Therefore, when we think about it, we might tend to think of wilderness as a place with wilderness characteristics. It might be located in a mountain, a desert, a forest, a lake, etc. However, no matter where wilderness is located, we inevitably view it with our personal knowledge, imagination, and emotional feelings about wilderness. It is because of this subjectivity that we are able to maximise our ability to define our own wilderness with our unique perceptions. Nash, R. F. (2001) said, “One man’s wilderness may be another’s resident picnic ground.” And where is my wilderness? And what characteristics does it have?

There is a patch of yellow, long-pole grasses in the central meadow of Wormwood Scrubs, London. As soon as I saw the grasses I was instantly drawn to them. I thought they had certain wild characteristics both primitive and chaotic. Most importantly, they reminded me of the wilderness scenes I had seen on my travels. The weeds in the cracks in the ground also evoked such a wild feeling when I walked through the streets of London. I wonder what makes these places interconnected? And under what circumstances does it inspire my wilderness emotions?