To go back to nature—in many ways has become the benevolent pledge of modern society whenever prospects turn bleak. But if there’s anything society has learned from the recent crisis, it is that the concept of ‘going back’ is vague, if not more complex than it appears considering the effects of nature have gone beyond what can be considered remote or gradual. We have learned that its blow can move swiftly, and near, within the most personal of spaces—our bodies. Nature, for many years, has evolved from being a space for retreat into a relation one must re-evaluate.

In his art, Poklong Anading has proposed this re-evaluation through works that involve degrees of consequences against nature. Whether about the nature of materials or the nature of systems, like in non-biodegradable plastic or the city’s sewerage structure, Anading exposes the constant dialogue of the modern individual, the city dweller in particular, has with his surroundings. Across the forms and processes that Anading deploys, an ever-present polarity hovers above their outcomes: the natural and artificial; the organic and synthetic.

These constant intermingling and associations between what could be for / against nature are marks of the ever-growing complexities of our relationship with her. At times ambiguous or inherently contradictory, like the above title which Anading chose for his exhibition, the syntactic dilemma which Noam Chomsky has presented in his book on linguistics, our relationship with nature seems to be one that can also be semantically re-purposed. Do we go back or get back at nature? That is the question which most of our actions / inactions have failed to address, and to which art has demanded more than just the simple re-framing of landscapes or the meditations across oceans. It has become more convoluted than that. Convoluted in the sense that the combinations of plastics, planting, piss, and sewers could be more riveting expressions if we carefully consider Anading’s proposition.

In one of his works for the exhibition, a participatory project emerges from the series, “study for planters and lighting fixtures,” which features upcycled discards like plastics and package containers to form pots and lamps sculpted with cement. For each pot, individuals from different walks of life are invited to participate in the actual planting of their desired flora and to see whether their growth can commence within the gallery space. Planting, here, as an activity, subverts the benevolent offering to nature and turns it into a gesture of intrusion—of ordinary individuals, at best, to test nature’s chances of survival against a much materially-contested space.

In another work—a syntactically challenging one—where one could either infer to as pissing through painting or painting as piss, involves the accidental abstraction found in the traces of the unceremoniously quotidian, or even maligned and barbaric act of urinating against walls. The traces are re-worked through the combination of light and dark cement, in which the result forms a series of painting-like structures, mimicking the patterns of trees and their branches, which make us wonder: whether it’s the organic that has imposed itself on the synthetic or vice-versa? Whether it's a critique of patriarchy’s tendency to dominate nature, or an affirmation of such command as a frail and ambiguous enterprise? 

Another work situated on the floor of the gallery is an installation called, “every water is an island.” Here, a video monitor showing hand-made vignettes of bodies of water is partially covered by the debris and rubble from the city’s sewage construction sites. This highlights Anading’s concept of the contrived relationship with our surroundings, of how sustenance and progress could become easily mistaken for ruin and waste. His consideration of the sewage system as a symbolic commentary on our culture stems from its paradox as a structure. It is a structure that aims to control nature and denote progress, but is concealed underground, hidden, as if the workings of a clandestine scheme to ensure contamination.

These works demonstrate, more than anything else, how culture is intertwined with nature, and how the consequences that humanity should face will remain dependent from this relationship. Poklong Anading, as an artist whose concepts are heavily informed by the quotidian—the objects and circumstances that have become embedded in our culture, is bound in this direction to confront and navigate their meanings and their repercussions. The show, colorless green ideas sleep furiously, reflects on these efforts, where even if meaning might remain elusive, the dialogue is certainly sound.