Ann Leda Shapiro
Body is Landscape
Axel Vervoordt, Hong Kong

Effervescent terrain, willowy figures, and meandering plants—Ann Leda Shapiro’s paintings ripple with life, conjuring a cosmically sublime universe. Stepping into her recent exhibition at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Hong Kong felt like entering a quietly lush dreamscape filled with mystical beings; and yet, despite the dazzling, transcendental imagery, her oeuvre is firmly grounded in the flaws and fissures of our earthly domain.

Marking the American artist-activist’s solo debut in Asia, “Body is Landscape” brought together vibrant watercolor-on-paper works that explore the fragile, reciprocal relationship between human physicality and the natural world. A recurring motif that conceptually anchored the show was the tree, which, for Shapiro, serves as a “refracted self-portrait.” Visitors first encountered this vegetal imagery in a small-scale painting by the entrance, titled Mountain Made of Sunshine (2025), which features a leafless, towering tree whose flesh-toned branches coil and extend outward like reactive appendages. The intricately detailed piece is set against a dusky background strewn with stars—infinitesimal pinpricks of light that hint at Shapiro’s studies of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, which she learned about in the 1980s while volunteering at an AIDS clinic in Texas.

Her interest in Eastern holistic philosophy—ideas of balance, renewal, and the interconnectedness of all species—emerges in various works. In Confusion and Protection/No Protection (both 2025), for example, Shapiro fulfills these principles through the visual equilibrium of warm and cool tones, and the clusters of orbs and spirals resembling microbes or DNA strands, which envelop the countless humanoid silhouettes floating across the panels. By dissecting, deconstructing, and melding anthropic forms with organic elements—roots and stems, light and darkness, water and fire—she sublimates our biological reality and emotional experience into a vast expanse of psychosomatic entanglements.