Wilderness, mountains, figures, myth and legends — Fable Peaks, the winter exhibition at Space of Time Gallery takes the traditional themes of landscape and myth as its point of departure, re-interpreting through contemporary visual language. Centred on photographic works by Chinese photography artists Yan Ming and Taca Sui, the exhibition is presented alongside a selection of ancient folk stone sculptures — warrior and Buddhist statues discovered from southern Chinese mountains — creating an imaginative dimension that rich in texture and sense of time.

Rather than advancing a single narrative, the exhibition unfolds a dialogue between photography and stone sculptures. Image and object operate together to propose a way of sensing place, time, and imagination — one that is open, layered, and experiential.

Landscape is no longer treated as a purely geographical entity. Instead, it becomes a field of subjective experience: a perceptual surface shaped by memory, duration, and cultural consciousness. Through each of their distinctive visual languages, Yan Ming and Taca Sui explore how landscape in the present moment can carry meanings that exceed direct observation.

Yan Ming’s photo works are known for their restrained yet palpable tension. Figures, wilderness, ruins, and cityscape of everyday life appear to hover in a state of suspension, without a clear narrative. The sense of narrative does not come through narration itself, but the subtle relationships between frames in the photo series, as if stop frames of a movie. Landscape ceases to function as a distant backdrop and instead becomes an active site of ritual residue and embodied perception. Myth, in Yan Ming’s work, does not appear through explicit storytelling. It permeates the images quietly, manifesting as persistent symbols and emotional undertones embedded within cultural memory.

Taca Sui approaches landscape through historical texts and folk tales, treating mountains and terrain as thresholds between time and narrative. His images depict real topographies, yet these spaces possess a liminal quality: caves, ridgelines, and ancient paths seem to connect the visible with the unseen, the present with the past. These landscapes are not static settings, but sites charged with presence, inviting contemplation of temporal depth, belief, and imagination. Here, myth may be understood as a continuing mode of perception — one that exists in the relationship between people and land, shaped through acts of looking, remembering, and return.

The stone warrior figures and Buddhist statues in the exhibition introduce a tangible dimension. Once positioned as guardians of mountains, villages, and communities, these sculptures were historically imbued with wishes and beliefs. Weathered by time, they reappear with their original functions softened or displaced. Yet their decayed material presence sustains a quiet sculptural force, extending contemporary imaginings of history, faith, and blessing.

Placed among the photographic works of Yan Ming and Taca Sui, these ancient stone statures are neither museum artefacts nor artistic sculptures. They operate as the imaginative bridges between image and matter, activating points of resonance across time. Their presence sustains the vitality of mythic thinking, echoing and reflecting the landscapes depicted in the photographs.

Fable Peaks does not seek to offer definitive interpretations or statements. Moving through the overlapping terrains of time, landscape, and imagination, the exhibition invites viewers to slow their pace in the deep winter season, to dwell within the intervals between image and object, and to reflect on how we might continue to inhabit the world — and its mountains — through our own subjective realms.