What Alice Found There invites viewers through the looking glass to reflect on the modes through which nature is molded into a prescriptive ideal. The installation consists of a printed screen viewed through a window, and an accompanying fabric swatch book. In both parts of the installation, commercial images of the natural world found in Kuala Lumpur and Frankfurt, two environmentally distinct cities, are reproduced side-by-side and indeterminably, suggesting the totalising tendencies of urban society’s depictions of nature today.

The use of the window recalls the consequential Picturesque habit of framing nature for aesthetic purposes. The screen conceals what is behind it, mirroring how nature has come to be handled as a highly controlled assemblage of elements. The swatch book plays further into the semantics of nature as decoration. Its image is materialised in a manner typically used for fabric furnishings—as an element to be cropped and reassembled visually, but not necessarily engaged within its physical reality.

By highlighting the often reductive modes in which nature continues to be represented, the installation prompts viewers to observe the natural world more sensitively: to peer behind its established image, and engage in its messy, material ecology of intemperate parts.

Jian Lin Wong and Katja Heilingbrunner are architectural designers from Malaysia and Germany respectively. They met during their postgraduate studies at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and share an interest in seeing as a method for spatial interrogation.