Morphology: Solo exhibition of paintings in combination with sculptures by Tobias Klein and Alvaro Cassinelli

The Slippery Morphology of the Aesthetic Rock
Chang Tsong-Zung
Tobias Klein and Peter Nelson are intellectually adroit artists and professors who took up the subject of the ‘aesthetic rock’ (or ‘scholar’s rock’) for their creative work early. To admire a naturally formed rock as an artistic object is peculiar, even though it is instinctive for humans to be attracted by strange objects. The long tradition of the ‘scholar’s rock’ in China is well known, and it is usually associated with the painting tradition of shan-shui, ‘mountain-water’ landscape, where the rock is deemed integral to the morphology of the mountain. But today, in the age of excessive material production, when much of worldly goods are industrially made, the question of the ‘form’ and constitution of the aesthetic rock, the ‘thing’ that is a ‘non-product’ and yet considered ‘aesthetic,’ deserves further scrutiny. As geological formation, the only valid morphological element of a rock is its crystalline structure, while the outer shape of the rock comes by accident of Nature. It is identified as an ‘aesthetic rock’ by virtue of the connoisseur’s gaze alone. Hence the rock becomes an object of contemplation, a presence that alerts the human to the world we live in. But what is special about the ‘form’ of the aesthetic rock that makes it stand out from the anonymous rock-world from which it emerges? What, for example, did the great Song dynasty artist-connoisseur Mi Fu (1051-1107) see in the rock that made him bow in excitement and cry out that it was a venerated friend he had sought for two decades?

For manufactured products we know what is ‘beautiful’ because they are made to be ‘beautiful,’ in the sense that they are meant to meet our expectations. An object found in nature does not know our expectations. The morphology of an aesthetic object found in nature could either reflect the morphology of desire, or that of regret. Perhaps this is why
Su Dongpo, a contemporary of Mi Fu, praised an aesthetic rock for its ‘ugliness’ because it presented a form that was beyond his grasp. The essence of the aesthetic rock, its ‘being,’ is not just its material spatial form but the temporal encounter with the connoisseur who grasps its transformative potential. Mi Fu the great connoisseur cried out in joy to
celebrate the transformative moment that revealed the morphological form of an aesthetic object. With this revelation the rock also revealed Mi Fu to himself. Klein and Nelson are both interested in exploring the fluid relationship between the geomorphological depth of natural objects and the limits of tools employed for navigating the abyss of these objects. For their current series of works the artists start with a found rock or a random flip of the paint brush, which then inspires the search for the morphological structure of a hidden aesthetic form. The tools used in the days of Su Dongpo and Mi Fu were poetry and calligraphy, today the artist’s tools are narrative tales and digital machinery. These two artists demonstrate how new technological equipment can help to extrapolate playful ideas and engage potential aesthetic objects, with the aim to reveal hidden seeds of transformation that is the secret of Being itself.

Peter A C Nelson (b.1984) is an artist working at the intersection of traditional art practices and digital technologies. Originally trained in painting and drawing, his diverse practice spans painting, computer games, animation, and interactive technologies. As an art historian and game scholar, Nelson's work explores how technological shifts mediate our relationship with landscape imagery and the physical environment. As a writer and
producer, he develops large-scale performances that focus on the relationship between mythology and technology. Peter A C Nelson has been developing this new suite of paintings for the past 6 years. Nelson has refined his practice to a combination of improvisational ink painting on rice paper and technical drawing. His ink paintings serve as an exploration of the unnamed, the irrational and the non-specific, whereas his technical drawings are an attempt to rationalise and articulate what the ink paintings suggest via fragments of science fiction, horror or computer-simulated growth algorithms. Nelson began this body of work in 2022 when he decided to change from doing technical drawings by hand to using a robotic drawing machine. This automation allowed him to spend more time focusing on the intimate act of ink painting and to deepen the complexity of his technical drawing by
linking the robot to his computer graphics practice. This series of paintings is paired with three short stories that the artist has developed. Together, the paintings and stories form a cosmogony, quietly exploring technogenesis, the silent religion of utilitarianism and irrational encounters of the body.


Tobias Klein (b.1979) is an architect and artist whose work articulates a syncretism of contemporary CAD/CAM technologies with site and culturally specific design narratives, intuitive non-linear design processes, and 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, opposing the traditional dualistic separation of digital workflows and analogue making. Tobias Klein's sculptural practice operates at the intersection of ancient Chinese cultural
traditions and contemporary digital fabrication. Central to his works in the exhibition are Gongshi, or scholar's stones—geological formations shaped over millennia, traditionally collected as portals to meditation and
windows into deep time. Klein's 3D-printed scaffolds introduce ambiguous technological structures that feel strangely organic, echoing the Neo-Confucian concept of "Li"— patterns existing simultaneously at micro and macro scales without separation between technological and natural, ancient and contemporary. His stone works explore morphology as an ongoing dialogue between geological time, cultural memory, and
technological intervention. The morphology Klein explores is ultimately about transformation without hierarchy, about patterns that connect microscopic and cosmic scales, about time made somehow comprehensible through objects that simultaneously contain deep history and active becoming.