The Fragility of Knowledge and Climate: Kristina Chan's Response to Maps

Speaking of her 2022 exhibition, Adrift, Kristina Chan explains, ‘I see the landscape as metaphor. I use it to address the idea of memory and place. I am interested in how we imbue objects and places with meaning.’

The artist’s emphasis on landscape remains evident in the present exhibition, Habitable Climes, along with her continued interest in the creation and transformation of meanings about place. These themes are scrutinised through interactions with The Sunderland Collection, particularly the varied projections and presentations of its early modern world maps, as well as engagement with previously popular geographic concepts, like climactic theory.

While maps are a core part of the inspiration for the pieces on display, Chan probes more deeply to investigate the objects that underlay the creation of those maps—navigational and surveying instruments—and that brought faraway spaces and species to the attention of a wider audience—wall maps, stereoscopes, and graphoscopes. This material focus invites the viewer to reflect on the changeable technologies by which humans capture geographic information specifically and on the fragility of knowledge and of ecosystems more generally.

In a departure from many artists who use cartography as part of their creative process, Chan does not dwell intensively on the content and symbolic language contained within a map’s neat line; rather, she engages with the way maps are laid out - in large panels in the case of Polar Day and Polar Opposite - or with how they are projected and enclosed, as in the case of the gold emblems adorn Habitable Climes.

This series of prints reference Aristotle’s five climes, a visualisation of which can be seen in a 1603 Latin edition of Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in The Sunderland Collection. Polar Day and Polar Opposite play with the dichotomies that define much geographic thought. They are based on two Chinese maps from the early nineteenth century that depict the terrestrial and celestial worlds.

Cartographic objects were often created in such pairings, showing the interrelated understanding of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial spaces and features. Chan focuses more on the dichotomy of extreme heat and cold, both of which can create deserts and command awe from those who experience their sometimes alien landscapes. Chan uses the large panel format of the source maps (which were made with wood blocks printed in relief; here, the artist uses pigment and screenprinting), to preserve their presentation style. Large wall maps were intended for close scrutiny and public, if still privileged and elite, display.

"Polar Day". Pigment print on Japanese Kozo White 110gsm. 180 x 320 cm, Edition of 3. And "Polar Opposite". Pigment print on Japanese Kozo Natural 110gsm. 180 x 320 cm. Edition of 3.

Just as the category of Explorer was socially constructed and unstable, so too were the very findings that one could glimpse through a stereoscope or peruse in an atlas. Chan highlights this instability most resonantly in the series Impossible Measures.

By photographing instruments used for surveying and navigation through a clouded screen, she draws attention to the precarity of information derived from such objects, including that used to make maps. The instruments depend on the quality of their craftsmanship, correct calibration, proper maintenance, the training and abilities of their user, the weather, and many other factors to give a reading that can be considered ‘accurate.’

Accuracy itself is a moving target dependent on the needs of the time and the society seeking the information. In the reporting process, however, such nuance was often shed in favour of a single, authoritative narrative or viewpoint. Revealing the fallibility of instrumentation, and of knowledge more generally, has played a major role in what Matthew Edney has termed the ‘sociocultural approach’ to the history of cartography, which is concerned with embedding maps and mapping practices in their historical context and trying to understand the needs of map makers and users on their own terms, rather than by the ideal of cartography created in the early nineteenth century.

The irascible deployment of that ideal has done much to make maps seem objective and authoritative, eliding their idiosyncrasies and specific stories in favour of an overarching totality. However, mapmakers throughout history have been vocal about their own limitations and those of their sources; the problem of uncertainty and how to deal with it has been paramount in cartography for centuries.

Chan helps to recover the subjectivity at the core of exploration and mapmaking, literally blurring the lines of the instruments she photographs to help the audience see the possibilities they contain more clearly.

"Impossible Measures". Etching, each measuring 25 x 25 cm. Series of 16, Edition of 10.

Chan explains in preparatory notes for Habitable Climes that she sought to communicate the inaccuracy of the instruments as ‘obscurity.’ Indeed, the original purpose and operation of many of these instruments is now little known due to new technologies. In a similar vein, the habitability of any clime is now open for debate, as humans intervene in nature at unprecedented rates and as nature reacts in increasingly volatile ways.

Through her focus on the instrumentation, theorisation, and consumption of landscape, Chan focuses the viewer on the how people have created spaces in the past and asks how we might protect or neglect such spaces in the future. What is habitable, for humans and for the planet? Where could and can humans live, and where should they live? In past work, Chan has spoken of her understanding of landscape as a precipice.

With delicacy and by utilising current and historical printing methods, Chan again draws our attention to edges and gaps in this piece, to the ragged seams of mapping and making knowledge, and the threatened precarity of the natural world that is exposed as never before. She invites us all to look and to act.

Dr. Katherine Parker

Cartographic Collections Manager, Royal Geographical Society

Dr Katherine Parker is the Cartographic Collections Manager at the Royal Geographical Society, where she promotes and preserves their collection of more than one million maps, charts, atlases, globes, and gazetteers. Trained as a historian (PhD, University of Pittsburgh, 2016), she is an expert in the histories of maps and mapping, exploration, empire, and the early modern Pacific world. Her publications include Historical Sea Charts: Visions and Voyages Through the Ages (2021).

Katie teaches the history of maps and mapping at London Rare Book School (School of Advanced Study, University of London) and the history of architecture at NYU London. She is the Co-Editor of Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography and the Administrative Editor of the Hakluyt Society.

The Sunderland Collection would like to extend its sincere thanks to The Royal Geographical Society, and in particular its map collection team, for granting Kristina Chan access to the Society’s archive of instruments. We are highly appreciative of the Society’s support and enthusiasm for the Art Programme. The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) is an established learned society and professional body for geography.