Map coordinates, the contours of mountains and seas, and the shifting seasons—these tangible forms anchor our understanding of a landscape. Yet, is 'landscape' merely an objective projection of reality, or is it a construct of subjective consciousness?

Artist Chinhsiang Liao’s solo exhibition, The Unreached Landscape, presents his recent series created between 2024 and 2025: 'Coastline', 'Sound of Water', 'Rain', and 'Distant Mountains'. Although titled after natural phenomena—oceans, flowing water, rain, mist, and peaks—these works delineate places that do not exist on any physical map. For Liao, painting has ceased to be a mere representation of the objective natural world; rather, it is an internal exploration—a continuous process of posing and answering questions that ultimately constructs a visual realm interwoven with perception, memory, and imagination.

In his practice, Liao employs minimalist lines and repetitive layering as a metric of time, treating the canvas as a sensory site where the body and temporality intersect. Through reiterative gestures, the accumulation and blending of pigments, delicate and drifting brushstrokes, and the rich tactile materiality built up by multiple thin washes of oil paint, he endows the picture plane with a vital rhythm akin to the ebb and flow of tides, or the gathering and dispersing of clouds. These layers—covered, concealed, resurfaced, and revealed—naturally yield subtle 'displacements' within the repetitive act of painting. Physically, this displacement induces a 'perceptual delay'. Amidst the visual dynamics and the rhythmic cadence of the lines, the viewer’s eyes require a moment to focus and adjust when confronting the painting's material surface. It is precisely within this minute temporal gap that the landscape's forms oscillate between ambiguity and clarity; boundaries dissolve into colour, and consciousness subsequently drifts into an alternative spatial dimension.

This painterly language serves as an elegant metaphor for the 'palimpsest' mechanism of human memory. Individual memory is never a static archive, but a dynamic, evolutionary process—continuously buried, overwritten, and leaving behind only fleeting impressions. Liao’s work captures the inevitability of this transience. As viewers stand before his paintings, their collective experiences of 'sea' or 'cloud'—summoned by visual habit—are dismantled and reconstructed before the warm, tactile materiality of the canvas.

Through this painterly dialogue, Liao invites the audience to enter the interstices of sensory experience. The unreached landscape is never an attainable destination; instead, it is a suspended state of preconception—a gaze that remains perpetually open.