The sculpture adopts the form of a traditional Chinese scholar’s rock—historically conceived as a microcosm of landscape and a meditative bridge between nature and civilization. Constructed from compressed Financial Times newspapers, the work assumes the mass of a mountain stone, resting upon an inverted cloud-like base that mirrors its contours. Together, these elements establish a suspended condition between earth and heaven, grounding the work in both material density and metaphysical ambiguity.

Its surface has been sanded to expose layered strata of text, reading like geological sediment. These embedded fragments of financial language evoke deep time, suggesting a landscape of information shaped by the high-velocity circulations of global capital—flows that generate utopian promise and dystopian consequence in equal measure. In this way, the work articulates an “ancient future,” where speculative horizons are already fossilized within the present.

The sculpture may also be understood through what Mark Fisher described as the hauntological condition: a state in which lost futures linger as spectral presences, unresolved and persistent. By conjoining the visual language of the scholar’s rock with the ephemera of financial newsprint, the work collapses temporal registers, allowing history, myth, and technological abstraction to coexist within a single recursive loop. It functions simultaneously as relic and prophecy, transforming the romantic sublime of landscape into a technosublime—one that invites contemplation not of nature’s divinity, but of the narratives and forces embedded within contemporary datascapes.

Occupying a liminal zone between the natural and the digital, the work reflects our shifting experience of time and space, and the ways in which human consciousness continues to negotiate meaning within the accelerating conditions of modernity.