Fotografiska Shanghai sits in a sprawling warehouse on the banks of the Suzhou River, once a vital shipping route and now at the heart of the city’s art district. On the next street over, tourists flock to the Sihang warehouse memorial, leaving small offerings at the site of a historic standoff during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In the background, glass-fronted skyscrapers house hotels and shopping malls. Walk a few hundred metres downstream and the colonial-era buildings of the Bund are in sight. This dizzying mix of worlds is a fitting site for Photographic Geomancy, a group show concerned with the fundamental plurality of landscape, and with its attendant histories. Curated by He Yining and organised in collaboration with the Guangdong Times Museum, the show assembles twenty two contemporary artists whose practices sit, per its press release, “at the intersection of art, geography, geology and geopolitics”.

The framing of Photographic Geomancy attends to the imaginative possibilities of this definition, approaching the relationship between geographic site and knowledge-making as both cumulative and creative.

In an essay from 2005, geographer Doreen Massey defines landscape as a “simultaneity of stories-so-far”, not a “series of static cross-sections” bound to sites or events, but an ever-changing compound of space and time. The framing of Photographic Geomancy attends to the imaginative possibilities of this definition, approaching the relationship between geographic site and knowledge-making as both cumulative and creative. As He lays out in an interview accompanying the exhibition, the starting point of the intervention lies in Chinese knowledge traditions, within whose logic geography is both a science and an art, a “haven for scholars’ minds as well as a platform for poets”. The exhibition is imagined, subsequently, as “continuing [the] ancient tradition of ‘examining the land’, albeit transforming it into visual language and artistic practice”.

In locating itself on this epistemic continuum, Photographic Geomancy adopts a layout that is at once structured and open to reconfiguration. The exhibition is presented in four sections - ‘Retracing Ancient Terrain’, ‘Geological Perception’, ‘Infrastructure Archaeology’, and ‘Poems of Phantom Lands’, corresponding loosely to traditional aesthetics, ecological engagements, infrastructural politics and speculative interventions. This division is less guide and more thematic prompt, with works slipping, physically and topically, between one section and the next.

Among the exhibition’s opening works is Zhu Yinghao’s Imaging a Traverse Through the Strata of 1868, a response to the travel diaries of German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, who undertook seven expeditions across China between 1868 and 1872. Retracing the path taken by von Richthofen, Zhu’s project is one of excavation and addition, the artist’s photographs of sites and lives along the geographer’s 19th century route providing a contemporary, human complement to the scientific record. This idea of geo-historic accretion is lent an affective dimension in Han Qian’s Stillness Between Two Waves of the Sea, a video work that maps the life and death of a pre-republican steel mill, a site caught in the historical crosscurrents of colonial exploration, the First World War and early nation-building. Han’s film explores the abandoned landscape of the now-defunct mill, superimposing archival photographs and cartographic diagrams with footage of the now sparsely peopled terrain. The quietly elegiac work marks a series of disappearances - “Vanished forests, trees, birds, roads/ Vanished houses, people, history, lands/ Vanished myths, legends, beliefs, sounds” - to prompt a consideration of the politics of resource extraction: what is built and what is abandoned, what is taken and what is left behind.

The extractivist logics of early European endeavours emerge once more in Zhang Beichen’s The Sun Rises, the Great Northern Telegraph Station Sinks into the Sea, a collection of photo-based and installation works that examine communication infrastructures as tools of colonial knowledge flows. Taking as their subject the 19th century establishment of a telegraph station on the island of Kulangsu in southeast China, Zhang’s works - which include colonial maps, manipulations of archival photographs and a transmission signal on a CRT TV - reflect upon the deeply political histories of tele-modernity. Against a sanitised view of technological advancement, the artist underscores its entanglement with the project of colonial expansion, asking how the traces of this nexus persist in the land.

If the works in Photographic Geomancy enact a broad embrace of geographic time, this is not to suggest that their quest is for complete dominion over place or past. In Leah Zhang’s three-channel installation In Emptiness There Is No Form, the viewer is presented with scenes from an active iron-ore mine. The shaky, indistinct frames, often of bodies and machinery obscured by darkness, underscore the sensory impenetrability of the site, and the opacity, by extension, of the landscape within which it is located. In multidisciplinary artist Ren Zeyuan’s video work Coast to Coast (Preamble), the landscape once more defies legibility, this time not for reasons of topography but for those of contagion. Produced in the summer of 2022, while the artist was stranded in the United States under harsh quarantine measures, the film consists of a meandering personal reflection delivered from San Francisco - the closest point on the North American coastline to the artist’s homeland on the other side of the Pacific. Atmospheric shots of a rugged coastline - windswept rocks, abandoned baths - are stitched together to produce a meditation on geographic indeterminacy, a measure of the distance between past and present, survival and ruin, coast and distant coast.

This reckoning with and acceptance of geographic reality is fundamental to Photographic Geomancy, an exhibition that approaches the land, in He's words, “not merely [as] a passive backdrop but [as] an active force participating in cultural production”. The effort, here, is not to lay claim to the land, physically or intellectually, but to find ways of communing with it that are reciprocal and reflexive. Even where the epistemic grammar of scientific research is deployed, as in photographer Zheng Andong’s series How to (Un)name a Tree, it is done with care. Zheng’s research-driven work presents large-scale monochromatic images of pine trees alongside photographic and textual excerpts of his process. Concerned with the contested taxonomies of the Huangshan pine, which was given distinct names by British and Japanese imperial missions, the work was created through a painstaking process of fieldwork in the tree’s various habitats. Zheng’s preoccupation is with the classificatory impulse inherent to both photography and botany, the implications of which, particularly in colonial contexts, are often flattening. In response, the artist presents a refraction of the botanical photograph, its fragmented form mirroring the contentious systems of natural history that circumscribe its subject.

Crucially, within the framework of Photographic Geomancy, the failures of knowledge-making are not confined to the past, extending, instead, through the present and into the imagined future. At the heart of the multi-chambered exhibition, on a screen set at an angle, He Zike’s video work Random Access performs an act of speculative reorientation. Two people drive through a city in collapse, knowledge systems malfunctioning after a data centre is hit by lightning. With GPS systems down, a temporary gap emerges for all that has largely been subsumed by ‘data’. Forgotten shortcuts appear, buried homes are recalled, the ancient shape of the land emerges in memory. “The map doesn’t know”, one character says to the other, “that these mountains were oceans in ancient times”. To know a geography is to learn what exceeds and will, one day, succeed it. There remain many more stories to tell than the ones we have told so far.