Nature in transit at Instituto Cervantes Shanghai and Beijing 2025-26

Nature in Transit: Between Instinct and Memory

A Photographic Dialogue Between the Balearic Islands and China

 

Toni Amengual: Walking on the Border, 2025

Tomeu Coll: Transcendence, 2025

Sílvia Prió: The Trementinaires: The Wise Women of the Mountain, 2025

Luo Dan: No Man's Land, 2021

Liu Zhenchen: Kaleidoscope, 2023; Panacea, 2022

The Instituto Cervantes, in collaboration with the Balearic Institute of Studies, presents an exhibition at its Shanghai and Beijing headquarters featuring the work of three photographers from the Balearic Islands: Toni Amengual, Tomeu Coll, and Sílvia Prió. In Shanghai the exhibition is complemented by the participation of these three Balearic artists in the Westbund art fair. The works engage in a dialogue with pieces by leading figures in contemporary Chinese photography, such as Liu Zhenchen and Luo Dan. With established artistic careers and international recognition, their works explore a common thread: the complex and ever-changing relationship between humankind and nature, examined from aesthetic, conceptual, and critical perspectives.

• Toni Amengual (Palma, 1980), a biologist by training and a photographer with a performative approach, presents Walking on the Border. This project, developed in the boreal forests of Finland, investigates the boundaries between the human and the natural, questioning the notion of “nature” as a cultural construct. His work combines photography and audiovisual elements, creating a space for reflection on freedom, introspection, and the dissolution of boundaries.

• Tomeu Coll (Sant Jordi, 1981) presents Trascendencia (Transcendence), a photographic project that, with an aesthetic somewhere between surrealism and documentary fiction, explores the tension between the animalistic roots of humankind and the new notions of transhumanism and technological singularity. His portraits suggest a symbolic transformation toward the instinctive and the biological, in a context marked by a crisis of values ​​and the uprooting of contemporary urban life.

• Sílvia Prió (Barcelona, ​​1972) presents Las trementinaires: las mujeres sabias de las montañas (The Trementinaires: The Wise Women of the Mountains), an artistic investigation into these women of the Catalan Pyrenees, knowledgeable in herbs and natural medicine, whose profession flourished between the 19th and 20th centuries. Her work recovers a memory of female autonomy and respectful coexistence with the natural environment, now at risk of being forgotten due to the growing separation between society and ecosystem.

• Luo Dan (Chongqing, 1968) presents the series No Man's Land, created between 2020 and 2024. The images depict vast natural landscapes where human activity has left its mark. The project documents how once-untouched natural environments have been altered and transformed by the incessant activity of humankind.

• Liu Zhenchen (Shanghai, 1976) presents the video Kaleidoscope and a selection of works from the Panacea project. Since 2022, the artist has gradually shifted his creative focus toward the natural world, exploring nature's profound healing power and its potential for spiritual renewal. The works on display continue the grammatical system of the Kaleidoscope series, but all their elements come from nature: petals, leaves, fruits, and other botanical fragments are incorporated into the play of mirrors, refracting a rhythmic structure imbued with a vital sense.

This project underscores the photographers' commitment to artistic creation that transcends aesthetics to question the ways in which we inhabit and conceive of the natural world. Using diverse languages ​​and approaches, these contemporary photography projects invite us to rethink our relationship with the environment.

For their conception and execution, the three projects by Balearic photographers presented here received a Creation Grant from the Institut de Estudios Baleáricos (IEB), a cultural institution belonging to the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sports of the Government of the Balearic Islands, which works to promote the visibility and internationalization of Balearic artists through strategic events with international reach.