Interpreting the Natural:
Contemporary Visions of Scholars' Rocks
Interpreting the Natural: Scholars' Rocks installation view. Photo credit: Brian Wilson.
September 20, 2026—January 17, 2027
A scholar’s rock is a naturally shaped stone traditionally collected and valued in East Asia as an object of contemplation. Throughout Asia, scholars have cultivated distinct practices: in Korea, Suseok; in Japan, Suiseki; in China, Gongshi. Collectors valued these stones for a variety of aesthetic qualities and traditions of display, not unlike a stone one might collect from a beach. Oftentimes, they are a portal or a micro-landscape that evokes a monumental one. The authentic scholars’ rocks in this exhibition, on loan from the local private collections of Kemin Hu and Timothy A. Springer, appear as contemporary abstract forms, fitting seamlessly alongside the artwork in this exhibition. Minimally altered from their natural state, these rocks challenge conventional ideas of authorship, authenticity, and the very essence of art. This group show features ten artists with cultural backgrounds from South Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan and the USA and local ties to Boston and New England: Kate Gilbert, Paul Harris, Danielle Krcmar, Lisa Tang Liu, Cathy Della Lucia, Andy Moerlein, Wen-hao Tien, Alice Wu, Yu-wen Wu, Quanzhou Zhao and is organized by guest curator Donna Dodson. Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars’ Rocks presents recent artwork by each artist in dialogue with authentic viewing stones. This contrast of traditional scholars’ rocks with contemporary interpretations encourages reflection on our enduring relationship with nature. As we face climate change and respond to the current challenges in our global society, we seek the meaning of our personal journeys in the 21st century. Contemporary art guides us in the present moment.
About the Artists
Kate Gilbert
Kate Gilbert is an artist, curator, and cultural leader whose work explores the transformative role of art in public life. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Boston Public Art Triennial, which opens minds, conversations, and spaces through contemporary public art. Gilbert holds an MFA from SMFA at Tufts University and a BA from Connecticut College. She lives and works in Boston and maintains a studio in East Boston. In sculpture, video, and installation, Gilbert explores consumption and the possibility of alternatives. She is interested in the relationships between objects, people, and the systems that connect them—particularly the things used for comfort, convenience, and security. Through found materials, humor, simulation, and meditative observation, her work asks viewers to look differently at the everyday and consider the systems and habits in which we participate.
Sidewalk Series 39, 2026, cast concrete (Amazon box, 2025), found asphalt (Harvard, Allston, MA 2019) and cast concrete (Poland Spring)
Paul Harris
Paul Harris is a transdisciplinary artist, poet, and Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. His art and writings on stone comprise “The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin.” He has exhibited at The Huntington Library and Gardens (Pasadena, CA), The National Gallery of Denmark (Copenhagen), and the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Cultures (Cagliari, Sardinia) and designed The Garden of Slow Time (Los Angeles). Recent co-authored books include Contemporary Viewing Stone Display (2018) and Julian Charrière: After the Smoke Cradle (2026). Informed by the Daoist concept of scholars’ rocks as condensations of cosmic energy, Harris regards a region’s distinctive stones as manifestations of Earth-spirit particular to a place. During an August 2026 residency at Art Complex he collected rocks from Massachusetts and Vermont to present in this exhibition. These stone-fishing expeditions and the ensuing works on display represent a gathering of stones, an assembling of tectonic elders from the local lithosphere.
Stones on Stools, paired rocks (collection of Paul Harris) and crickets/stools (collection of Paula Trepanier Harris) (2020-2026) 19th c. cricket, chert from Palos Verdes
Danielle Krcmar
Danielle Krcmar is an independent artist and curator of the RSM Gallery at Bentley University. She has received grants from the St Botolph Club Foundation, the MCC, the SAC, the Blanche Colman Foundation. Collaboration with architects, artists, and informs her creative practice. Her artwork has been reviewed in Ocean In a drop, Sculpture Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Boston Phoenix, and Arts Media. In Krcmar’s Post Consumer Terrain sculptures, discarded clothing and fabric samples are cut, unraveled, sewn, and reshaped into soft rocks, mosses, sedges, and contained topographies. Drawing from low-growing plants, urban groundscapes, and Chinese scholar’s stones, the work invites close looking and shifts in perceptual scale. Through slow hand stitching, cycles of consumption and disposal meet geologic time, suggesting nature as active, dynamic, and deeply connected to our bodies, surroundings, and everyday lives.
The Little Plot, 2023, found stool, wool, upholstery fabric, yarn, cotton thread
Lisa Tang Liu
Lisa Tang Liu is a mixed-media visual artist. She is an alumna of Wellesley College and a recipient of the 2026 Mass Cultural Grant for Creative Individuals in Visual Arts. Held in several private collections as well as the Danforth Art Museum’s permanent collection, Lisa’s work has exhibited across the United States. The fortune cookie, repeatedly incorporated into Liu’s scrolls, occupies her mind as a Chinese American symbol. Lisa gazes at scholars’ rocks from the perspective of an American belonging to the greater ethnic Chinese diaspora. Cyanotype on paper, its blue-and-white reminiscent of Chinese porcelain, is a western, historic photographic process with roots in nature observation. Liu painted the UV-light-sensitive emulsion using unconventional, vigorous brushstrokes with qi in mind. Embellishments are then added to create visual stories.
Evolution, 2026, cyanotype and cotton thread on paper. Treated with cold wax
Cathy Della Lucia
Cathy Della Lucia (b. South Korea) creates multi-part sculptures from wood, ceramic, and digitally fabricated materials that are built to come apart. Her work uses modularity to consider relationships between the body, tools, toys, and weapons, and how objects can evoke bodily experience. Drawing on the histories of wood, clay in domestic spaces, she explores their associations with protection, consumption, ritual, play, and violence. Della Lucia’s work explores impermanence, nostalgia, and the gamification of labor and systems through modular sculptures assembled from carved fragments of everyday objects. Using furniture joinery, repetitive handwork, and digital fabrication, she builds forms that can be disassembled, repositioned, and rebuilt. These shifts blur distinctions between function and bodily experience. They allow gesture, strain, resistance, and play to emerge through materiality while emphasizing the imperfections and human character embedded in objects closest to our human habits.
Table of Contents, 2025, MDF, birch plywood, wood, rubber gym flooring, neoprene, hardware, lazy susan, 3D printed PLA, aluminum, paint (with wood and ceramic objects)
Andy Moerlein
Andy Moerlein’s sculptures have been shown in museums, sculpture gardens, and galleries from Alaska to New York, Switzerland to Peru. Mr. Moerlein has an extensive resume of public art works and site specific monumental outdoor sculptures. Mr. Moerlein has been an arts advocate, gallery director, and educator for over 30 years. Besides his solo studio career, he produces monumental public art with Donna Dodson as The Myth Makers. Moerlein holds a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from Cornell University. Natural forces like geology and weather are deeply embedded in our daily chemistry and our living story. Moerlein’s art presents a personal reaction to the powerful interaction between psyche and phenomena. The goal is both sensual and conceptual. The art makes visible a personal narrative. Moerlein is a storyteller. Besides this indoor show, Moerlein is one of the featured artists in the outdoor exhibit Under Construction: America at 250.
New Moon Stone , 2026, oak, graphite, spalted maple with color enhancements
Wen-hao Tien
Wen-hao Tien (Taiwan-born, U.S.-based) is a conceptual artist whose practice bridges communities. She is a teaching artist, curator, and member of Boston Sculptors Gallery. Her work has been widely exhibited in galleries, universities, and natural environments. Tien holds an MPH from Columbia University and an MFA from Lesley University. Her project Weed Out is featured in Crossing Boundaries and Confounding Identity: Chinese Women in Literature, Art, and Film (SUNY Press, 2023).When looked at closely, her “scholars’ rocks” are formed from button-down shirts. She imagines the hidden labor contained within an ordinary shirt and the lives of those whose work made it clean and pressed. Tien was moved by stories of Chinese laundries a century ago and their significance in Asian American history, locally and globally, which led to Laundry Rocks. Today, the work extends beyond this history to memorialize the often overlooked immigrant laborers’ endurance, dignity, and resistance.
Laundry Rock #03, 2021, photographic laser transfer, graphite, and color pigment on paper
Alice Wu
Alice Wu (b. Worcester, MA, lives and works in Oakland, CA) holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and studied literature and printmaking at Wellesley College. Wu transforms discarded textiles and glassine into vivid, precariously balanced forms—glued, stitched, slashed, pleated, stuffed, and painted into presence. Moving between freestanding, hanging, and wall-based relief sculptures, these works foreground soft materials’ folds, seams, frays, and capacity to retain traces of labor and history. Their openings and textured surfaces invite viewers to imagine holding, wearing, or rearranging them, activating the sculptures as objects that hover between body, landscape, and image. Grounded in reuse and handwork, Wu’s practice considers performance in everyday life, self-presentation, and reinvention after loss. Through abstraction, she explores the distance between self-understanding and external perception, proposing renewal as a tactile, participatory encounter shaped by care and resourcefulness.
Alice Wu Studio, installation view
Yu-Wen Wu
Yu-Wen Wu (b. Taiwan) is an interdisciplinary artist whose material-driven practice examines migration, displacement, memory, and belonging through the intersections of art, science, ecology, and culture. Working across drawing, video, installation, community-engaged practice, and public art, Wu transforms materials—including tea, porcelain, gold, and organic matter—into evocative sites of inquiry. Informed by her experience of immigration and the Asian diaspora, her work considers how histories, identities, and environments are carried, transformed, and reimagined across borders. Rooted in Yu-Wen Wu’s lifelong attentiveness to the natural world, Artifacts considers landscape, memory, ancestry, and migration through small-scale rock sculptures inspired by Chinese scholar’s rocks. Recalling rocks collected with her grandparents in Taiwan, these humble objects become vessels of memory and belonging. Displaced from their traditional context, each rock functions as both symbol and bridge—carrying histories, geographies, and cultural memory across borders while opening a contemplative space between place, time, and identity.
Artifact XXV, 2026, porcelain, rocks, mahogany (base)
Quanzhou Zhao
Quanzhou Zhao (b. China) is a Massachusetts-based contemporary artist who trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels (Gold Medal recipient) and holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Deeply rooted in traditional Chinese calligraphy and ink painting since childhood, Zhao seamlessly fuses Chinese ink with Western oils and acrylics across rice paper and canvas. His cross-cultural works and live performances have been exhibited internationally. Zhao’s work navigates the fluid boundaries between Eastern and Western traditions. Grounded in Chinese calligraphy and Shan shui painting, he pairs classical motifs—such as pines and scholar’s rocks—with modern means of transportation. Incorporating Zhao’s signature "Van Gogh Cun" brushstroke, he merges Post-Impressionist expressionism with traditional Chinese brushwork. In an age of rapid technological acceleration, his paintings invite viewers to slowdown, pause, and reconnect with their own inner landscapes.
Borrow Another 500 Years from the Heavens, 2026, mixed media: Chinese ink and color on rice paper, mounted on canvas, acrylic and oil on canvas.
