In Whispers of the North (2020), Zhengwei Fan offers neither spectacle nor definitive resolution. Instead, we are presented with a triptych of subdued atmospheres—mountain, house, waterfall—that reads less like a landscape painting and more as a visual elegy. Rendered in watercolor on fine art paper, each panel holds a quiet but acute attentiveness: not to what is visible, but to what may be vanishing. Fan’s images linger in the space between observation and memory, where the act of drawing becomes an attempt to stay with disappearance.
Originally exhibited at 1215 Gallery in Montreal as part of From Breath to the Dirt, the work draws from Fan’s ongoing engagement with solitude, slow time, and ecological fragility. Based in London, the Chinese-born artist is known for his meditative image-making, often combining watercolor and pencil in quiet, observational studies of both interior and natural life. Across earlier projects like Funeral—his illustrated lament for the melting Oak Glacier—and Idle Time, which catalogued the repetitiveness of daily office life, Fan demonstrates a consistent interest in small gestures: the unnoticed, the unspoken, and the emotionally subtle.
Whispers of the North is perhaps the most distilled example of this sensibility. The Icelandic landscapes are not presented as topographical in the traditional sense, but more as topophilic: the first panel’s distant mountains appear almost withdrawn, their contours softened by light and absence. The central image—a solitary house atop a hill—avoids sentimentality through restraint. It does not signify human warmth; instead, it emphasizes a quiet, calm sense of abandonment. The final panel’s waterfall, barely moving, offers the only hint of temporal flow—yet even this feels more like a metaphor for memory than vitality.
What stands out in Fan’s work is his preference for subtlety over declarative statements. His work follows a Bergsonian sense of time in that it inhabits that durée réelle space: time as fluid, subjective, and felt rather than quantified. There is no overt narrative or grand thematic claim. Instead, there is an effort to capture the experience of witnessing loss slowly and intimately. His technique reinforces this: the use of light washes, restrained mark-making, and careful compositional balance all speak to an aesthetic of understatement.
Photo Courtesy: Artist Zhengwei Fan
(Whispers of the North (2020), Installation View, “From Breath to the Dirt”, 1215 Gallery, Montreal, Canada.)
Like Morton’s ‘hyperobjects’—entities so vast in scale or duration that they elude straightforward perception—Fan’s landscapes feel almost too slow, too vast, or too fragile to fully hold. The melting of glaciers, the quiet erosion of memory, and the slowness of solitude are not simply events for the audience to witness but conditions we are gently reminded we inhabit. Fan doesn’t attempt to represent these phenomena in full; instead, he gestures toward their edges, their atmospheres, where human presence is fleeting at best.
This resistance to narrative closure or symbolic overstatement might risk ambiguity or drift, yet Whispers of the North succeeds precisely because of this restraint. It invites the viewer to remain with the quiet, the unresolved, and the almost-gone. Fan not only evokes loss; he creates a space for remembering its necessity, where the triptych becomes less a depiction of landscape and more a vessel for perception itself. In this, Fan reminds us that landscape is never neutral. To depict land is also to engage with questions of memory, belonging, and care. The ethical force of the work lies in its refusal to aestheticize devastation: instead, Fan portrays the environment as a shared vulnerability between image, viewer, and the world. At a time when landscape art often risks either nostalgia or spectacle, Whispers of the North offers a more reflective proposition: that to dwell in fragility is not to be passive, but to remain present.
Author’s Biography
Victoria Comstock-Kershaw is a London-based art critic and founder of FETCH London, a platform dedicated to thoughtful engagement with contemporary art. Her work spans postmodernist and post-internet art, reinterpreting classical criticism through a modern lens. Known for her sharp insights and innovative perspectives, she bridges historical narratives with today’s artistic developments, contributing to a deeper understanding of art’s evolving cultural relevance.
