Alisan Fine Arts is pleased to present Ephemeral Ground, an exhibition that features three artists from across the globe. Their work nevertheless shares investigations into ephemerality, the passage of time, and humanity’s changing relationship to the landscapes that surround us. Despite their distinct visual languages, the works of Mark Baugh-Sasaki (San Francisco), Pan Caoyuan (Hangzhou), and Yeoh Choo Kuan (Kuala Lumpur) reveal an underlying exploration of liminal spaces, navigating the fluid boundaries between place and time.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki’s practice examines the influence of cultural, historical, and geological forces on our perception of landscape—and, in turn, how those landscapes shape our understanding of ourselves. The Present Throws Its Shadow was made at the height of the pandemic, the same season in which Mark Baugh-Sasaki welcomed his daughter into the world and the 2020 wildfires burned across California. In a time of great stress and upheaval, his world shifted overnight. Places that had long offered peace and respite were drastically changed by fire, a jarring reconfiguration of the landscape he knew. As he contemplated what had been lost, Baugh-Sasaki began to question his expectations of the terrain, and how much of that assumption was shaped by perception rather than by the land itself.
The work comprises a length of wood bent under the weight of a stone, which was gathered from the Carson River within the burn area of the Tamarack Fire. The stone hovers just above a container of earth from the same site, a location Baugh-Sasaki has long been connected to. He often sees the bowed wood as a reflection of himself: flexible under the weight of circumstance, reshaped by it. The stone carries the psychological gravity of the event. It remains suspended over the soil, at once a part of and forever separated from the earth.
“In this suspension, the work holds the memory of what was lost, the current state of the place, and its uncertain future. The landscape exists as past, present, and future all at once.”
Baugh-Sasaki also presents a smoke work entitled Unsettled Ground. Carbon is the defining element of our time—it is present in wildfire smoke, in atmospheric CO₂, and in the layers of industrial-era soot preserved in Antarctic glaciers. The artist works directly with the material, layering smoke onto paper to capture a substance between the physical and the intangible, producing a fixed snapshot of a fleeting element.
In Unsettled Ground, Baugh-Sasaki cuts apart these recorded impressions, reassembling a form that recalls a plume of smoke above a low ridgeline. Each fragment is collected at a different site, so the work becomes an assemblage of personal experiences and studies: a shifting portrait drawn through place. The artist’s technique echoes several traditions, drawing parallels to Wolfgang Paalen’s use of smoke in his fumage works to explore automatism (the making of marks that are not consciously controlled). Similarly, Unsettled Ground nods to Japanese calligraphy, where each composition is treated as a meditation, and each mark is made with intention and presence of mind.
Yeoh Choo Kuan creates ‘mountain-scapes’ through his signature method of spilling, dripping, and scratching paint across heavily textured canvases—a technique he calls “fleshing abstraction.” Marks accumulate, repeat, bleed, and peel away, with geometric structures overlaid and interrupted by looser gestures. The irregular wooden surfaces are built as overlapping visual fields, though the artist blurs the physical ‘boundary’ between them. A stain begins to suggest a mountain, a drip resolves into water, a fold reads as a cliff face, and repetition turns pattern to terrain—before the reading slips, and the surface re-abstracts.
The resulting works carry themes of impermanence, fluidity, and even violence. Indeed, in his artist statement, Yeoh reveals a fond memory of discovering an illustrated book on Diyu, the Buddhist depiction of hell. The experience sparked a life-long fascination with human suffering. “It was weird,” Yeoh reflects with a smile. “I felt guilty that I was so excited by these images within such a spiritual environment. They were designed to scare, yet I was so inspired by them.”
Even so, there is a spirituality to Yeoh’s work that leans more serene than violent. Singaporean curator Deborah Lim explains: “Yeoh’s earliest encounters with mountains did not take place in nature, but within the painted interiors of Thai Buddhist temples in Kelantan, Malaysia, where he spent his childhood. The murals within the temples were inhabited by towering mountains, spiritual worlds, and vivid depictions of the afterlife—forming an immersive visual language in which landscape, spirituality, and cosmology were enmeshed together.”
Yeoh’s works, though they are read as landscapes, are an act of transformation rather than concealment. He is interested in the assumption of the eye—how little visual information is required before we label artwork as landscapes, and whether a landscape can be present without ever being depicted. Yeoh treats traditional landscape painting not as a fixed historical aesthetic, but as a way of organizing sight—one capable of inhabiting materials and processes it was never intended for.
Pan Caoyuan works with natural lacquer, incorporating metals, mother-of-pearl, pearls, fibers, and various powders used in preparing lacquer supports and grounds. She is drawn to the inherent volatility of lacquer, which is consistently changing and becoming. The artist explains:
“Lacquer sap is harvested from lacquer trees, and its properties are affected by differences among the trees themselves: their growing conditions, and the timing and method of harvesting. Its curing into a lacquer film involves a series of reactions, including the laccase-catalyzed oxidative polymerization of urushiol; the composition of the sap, laccase activity, temperature, humidity, and other conditions all affect this process. Even after more than ten years of working with lacquer, I still cannot fully predict how it will appear at each stage. To some extent, I look forward to these changes, and to accidents in the making process.”
Pan’s practice unites a diverse and sweeping collection of visual art practices: painting, tracing, modeling, carving, incising, filling, inlaying, grinding, splashing, and more.
“I think of the entire making process as a kind of construction similar to geological sedimentation. New lacquer layers continually cover earlier ones, while sanding causes parts of the underlying layers to reappear. The image gradually forms through repeated cycles of applying lacquer, curing under controlled humidity, sanding, adding material, and sanding back again.”
Pan Caoyuan’s Secluded Play series is created on a wooden panel and constructed through the application of numerous layers of sap. Each layer requires time, polishing, and controlled conditions to cure, resulting in a shifting, luminous polymer surface that changes with the viewer’s movement. Embedded in the lacquer are pieces of mother-of-pearl, abalone shell, and silver snake forms; red mica creates iridescent splashes of color that seem suspended in space. Grounded in Chinese lacquer customs, Pan bridges themes of ritual, ornamentation, and premodern cosmologies with the contemporary, exploring modes of understanding that predate modern scientific materialism.
About the Artists
Mark Baugh-Sasaki
Mark Baugh-Sasaki is based in San Francisco and is an interdisciplinary artist whose art practice focuses on our connection to place through embedded narratives in both the built and the natural landscape. In recent work, he has turned his attention to geology as a framework for understanding our place in time and space—examining how rock formations, erosion, and the slow processes of the Earth serve as silent witnesses to human impact. He received his BFA in 2004 from Carnegie Mellon University and his MFA in 2017 from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been on display at the Autry Museum of the American West and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In 2024, he was the inaugural visiting artist fellow for the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He has been a resident at Headlands Center for the Arts and an Honorary James Irvine Fellow at Djerassi Resident Artist Program. His work is included in public collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Cantor Art Center, Recology Artist in Residence Program, and the University of San Francisco.
Pan Caoyuan
Pan Caoyuan (b. 1991, Zhejiang, China) received her BA and MA from the China Academy of Art. She is currently pursuing a PhD at Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts and teaches at Shaoxing University. She lives and works in Zhejiang. She primarily uses natural lacquer as her medium, creating lacquer paintings, lacquer sculptures, and installations. Pan is the recipient of the Gold Award at the Qiao Shiguang Lacquer Painting Art Innovation Award (Tsinghua University). Her works are held in the collections of the National Art Museum of China, Fujian Art Museum, Hubei Museum of Art, Museum für Lackkunst (Germany), and China Port Museum. Her work has been exhibited recently at ShangART WB Central (Shanghai, 2025), Zhejiang Exhibition Hall (Hangzhou, 2025), Hubei Museum of Art (Wuhan, 2024), MACA Art Center (Beijing, 2024), Zhejiang Art Museum (Hangzhou, 2024), China Academy of Art Museum (Hangzhou, 2024), Today Art Museum (Beijing, 2023), National Art Museum of China (Beijing, 2021), Shandong Art Museum (Jinan, 2021), and China Port Museum (Ningbo, 2021).
Yeoh Choo Kuan
Born in Malaysia in 1988, Yeoh Choo Kuan’s practice articulates the tension between a spiritual élan and the magnetism of desire, violence and the flesh. The natural landscape and the overload of information are extremes of a spectrum he embraces and represents in all its contradictions.
Yeoh Choo Kuan’s solo exhibitions include: Once Broken, Considered Soul, Richard Koh Fine Art, Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 2025; What Makes A Mountain, eslite spectrum, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; What Makes A Mountain, Richard Koh Fine Art, Gillman Barracks, Singapore, both 2023; Human Nature, Roof top of Avenue K Shopping Mall, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2022; Today’s Special, Richard Koh Fine Art, Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 2020.
