Scenographies marks Ho Rui An’s first solo exhibition in China and his first collaboration with Vanguard Gallery, bringing together three long-term projects that collectively foreground the artist’s sustained engagement with the relationship between landscape and power.

Through lecture, film, and installation, Ho’s practice reframes aesthetic experience as a form of knowledge production—and vice versa—by weaving rigorous historiography, critical fictioning, and speculative storytelling into idiosyncratic montages that give rise to fresh avenues of intellectual inquiry.

What preceded this exhibition was Ho’s integration of fieldwork into his artistic practice, exemplified by his long-standing research into the political economies of East and Southeast Asia. This research draws upon a transnational mode of ethnography to challenge familiar narratives of the region’s booms and busts and to urge a more layered interpretation of the images that reconstitute the region as spectacle. More recent works have engaged more specifically with China’s developmental trajectory spanning the late Qing to post-Reform eras, best demonstrated in The World of Lines (2025), his upcoming film on the over-century-long history of the textile industry between the Yangtze and Pearl River Delta regions.

The exhibition highlights a lesser-discussed aspect of Ho’s art: the conceptual plasticity of his installations, which, resembling film sets and props, offer speculative and sometimes humorous riffs that are distinctive from other more pensive mediums. At times, they act like MacGuffins that propel inquiry, or Chekhov’s Guns that quietly sustain tension—plot devices that relate to Ho’s eloquent storytelling, often lingering long after its delivery as a persistent afterthought. The artist refers to these props and built environments as “scenographies,” which can be understood as his critical spin on “scenario planning”—a speculative methodology that originated in military strategy and corporate management.

The scenes Ho enacts include Solar: A Meltdown (2014–17), a lecture-installation set in a tropical interior with a manually operated colonial fan, known as a punka. Navigating both climate politics and technologies of comfort, the narrative begins with the figure of sweat—an elusive, fleeting trace through which the colonial domestication of the tropical environment becomes palpable. A Petropolis in a Garden with a Long View (2024) surrounds the viewers with lush vegetation, presenting a botanical-themed office of a futurist working in the oil industry in the company of Fuelling Apocalypse (2024–25), a set of prints considering an underexamined history of the Singapore’s petroleum industry. Together, they lend visible form to the Garden City’s embeddedness within the global refining, storage, distribution, and petrochemical industries—an involvement that has enabled it to emerge as a global oil hub despite possessing no natural reserves. Interventions on a Mountain (2025) is a new film installation that looks into Moganshan, a storied summer retreat in Zhejiang whose emergence was tied to Shanghai’s economic ascent, with policy gatherings and tides of tourism alike turning the mountain into a stage for history’s dramatic interventions.

With the works installed as a series of constructed sets, the audience is invited to pass through these varied scenes and reflect on the artist’s long-standing concern with the politics of landscape. For him, “landscape” refers not only to an object of visual contemplation but also an active process of refiguring—that is, of landscaping—nature. As the works suggest, to approach landscape in this way requires a critical practice of “scenography,” through which one traces the networks of power that enable the staging of a scene.