LEAP S/S 2025 TO THE MOUNTAINS

Mountains, as commonplace as they may seem, embody a quiet constancy imbued with vast symbolic resonance. They have loomed in our collective imagination as both refuge and challenge—sacred realms, geological fortresses, and sites of ancestral memory. In LEAP’s Spring/Summer 2025 issue, “To the Mountains,” we turn our gaze upward and inward, to engage with the highlands not simply as remote landscapes but as generative spaces of artistic inquiry and cultural resilience. We examine the myriad ways in which artists, thinkers, and local communities are attuning to, living with, and learning from these elevated terrains.

Far from being monolithic or peripheral, mountain regions are complex ecologies—at once fragile and forceful, contested and sacred. The cultures that grow from these geographies bear witness to long histories of adaptation, spiritual attunement, and ecological stewardship. This issue gathers works that engage directly with mountainous terrains—through ritual, material, sound, and story. These are not merely aesthetic responses, but attempts to attune to a slower temporality: to weather patterns, to geological rhythms. The mountain becomes not only a backdrop, but a co-creator, exerting its own form of authorship.

In the following pages, you’ll encounter practices that chart pilgrimage paths, retrace lines of displacement, and listen for the voices of endangered species—blending myth and topography, oral histories and ecological research. Artists are returning to Indigenous knowledge systems not as static repositories, but as evolving tools—recalibrated in the face of climate crisis, extractive capitalism, and cultural erasure.

“To the Mountains” is both a document and an invitation: to consider the mountain not as an idealized elsewhere, but as a site of urgent relevance. At a time when so much of the world’s attention is fixed on speed, scale, and surface, the mountain asks us to slow down, to ascend differently, to dwell. In gathering these perspectives, we hope “To the Mountains” becomes not just a thematic issue, but a gesture of reorientation—towards depth, towards relation, towards the enduring knowledge embedded in elevation.

Contents

Seen and Remembered by the Mountains: Polyphonies of Friendship in Liangshan
Text by Rui Lanxin

Spoken Leaves
Project by Xiaoyi Chen

Seeing the Southwest Chinese Women through the Independent Lens
Text by Wang Yuanyin

River Kwai: This Memorial Service was Held in the Memory of the Deceased
Project by Saroot Supasuthivech

Common Sense and Sacred Sites: Rethinking Ecological Art and Its Landscapes
Text by Yuan Fuca

On Tairan Ge and Tenzin Dhame’s Lhasa Fish
Text by Zian Chen

The Mountain That Hid
Project by Sim Chi Yin

An Exhibition About Exhibitions: Mountains and Ethnographies
Curation and Text by Yang Yunchang

Le Pays Maudit
Project by Tant Yunshu Zhong

Moving Mountains: Su Yu-Xin’s Art and Contemporary Poetry of the Asian Diaspora
Text by Wang Weiji

The Fragrant Mountain Winds
Project by Etan Pavavalung