MORPHOLOGY
Peter Nelson and Tobias Klein (in collaboration with Alvaro Cassinelli)

Hanart TZ Gallery is pleased to present “MORPHOLOGY”, duo exhibition of Tobias Klein and Peter Nelson, opening on 13 December 2025 (Saturday), 2–6 pm.

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?

簡鳴謙Tobias Klein,  Cloud Rock VI, 2025, 1 Taihu rock and stainless steel 41.5 × 22.9 × 23.5 cm		彼得•倪森 Peter Nelson, Things Left Behind, 2025, Ink on paper 79.5 x 43 cm

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 geo-morphological 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.