Landscape is not merely where history takes place; landscape itself is produced by history. What appears before us as a natural or ordinary environment has been shaped over time by human movement and the accumulated will of those who inhabit it. Landscape is also political. The land we occupy is never simply given: it has been cultivated, claimed, colonized and abandoned. As human societies divide themselves, boundaries are imposed upon what was once continuous nature.

Bringing together the uninhabited yet captivating scenes depicted in the paintings of Thai artist Vacharanont Sinavaravatn and Mexican artist Santiago Mora, the exhibition considers landscape as a site of constant negotiation between human existence and the natural and material worlds. Across rural northeastern Thailand and the urban environments of Mexico, their paintings reveal landscapes in which the past persists quietly within the present.

Vacharanont Sinavaravatn is particularly drawn to the eerie moments when dusk settles into darkness, producing a simultaneous sense of beauty, fascination and unease. Where shadowy hills meet the glowing sky, pylons stand alert with blinking red lights, while roads wind mechanically around the mountains. Sinavaravatn’s recurring journeys have taken him to northeastern Thailand, particularly the border areas deeply implicated in the Cold War and the conflicts in Indochina. Here, mountains and forests extend across national boundaries, yet their continuity is disrupted by human divisions. Military bases and networks of infrastructure were built across the region as a result of ideological confrontation.

Returning to his studio, Sinavaravatn reconstructs these encounters from memory. The immersive paintings muffle the landscape in serenity and stage-like layers, gradually revealing the hidden agendas embedded within the environment. Meticulously rendered by brush, their flattened surfaces act as a filter between memory and reality, maintaining a distance between the artist and the places represented.

Santiago Mora embeds complex colonial histories, grand origin myths, and narratives of nationhood within ordinary Mexican domestic life, where persistent, seemingly insignificant forms of nature continually intrude upon human environments. Giant ficus trees, for instance, evoke the long history of botanical circulation between Asia and Mexico initiated under colonial rule; now firmly rooted in Mexican soil, their enormous roots push against the infrastructure built around them. The artist’s recurring geometries—tiles, grids and patterned surfaces—suggest rational organization, yet they are constantly interrupted by the presence of nature.

Similarly, in another work, Mora brings forth Mēxi, his interpretation of the Mexica patron deity Huitzilopochtli, focusing not on the familiar eagle of the Mexican national emblem but on the deity’s hummingbird form, resting on a nopal cactus planted in an improvised bucket. Ancient deities no longer appear as monumental figures in Mora’s work. Instead, the forces they embody inhabit rivers, plants, animals and other forms of life, leaving traces of the divine in the most mundane corners of everyday life.

The exhibition title “Warm Soil” takes its cue from the Chinese expression retu, evoking a land invested with attachment, fertility and aspiration. Against erasure, concealment and failed systems of control, the landscapes of Sinavaravatn and Mora retain the possibility of resilience and regeneration. In depicting nature, both artists continually recalibrate the place of human existence within it, reminding us that the landscapes we claim, divide and transform will always exceed our attempts to possess them.