Artist Teresita Fernandez believes landscapes are far from neutral backdrops of rock and soil. For her, they represent charged sites layered with complex histories, political tensions, and deeply embedded cultural assumptions that have often been deliberately erased from public memory.

"The land, the ocean, the water – these are never really neutral places," Fernandez explained during a recent interview with The Korea Times, coinciding with her new solo exhibition "Liquid Horizon" at Lehmann Maupin Seoul. "Even though we may think of a landscape or a seascape as this beautiful, free image, it's always loaded with histories that are not just invisible but deliberately erased."

When examining any location, Fernandez focuses on understanding how places exist in our collective imagination and what stories are being omitted. "So when I'm looking at a place, I tend to think about how this place lives in our imagination and what's being left out, what isn't being told – geographically, racially, economically," she said.

In several of her installations, Fernandez incorporates gold and pyrite, the shiny yellow mineral commonly known as "fool's gold," to create scenes that appear to shimmer with deceptive tranquility. However, beneath this attractive surface lies her deeper reflection on how the Americas were violently transformed through westward expansion and colonization, all driven by the pursuit of these gleaming materials.

The artist has also demonstrated how contemporary maps perpetuate inherited biases by privileging north over south, center over periphery, and first world over third world perspectives. "Maps have long been a tool of colonialism that distorts your perception of reality," Fernandez noted. "Things are not really the size you see in relation to one another. The Mercator projection we're all familiar with, for example, allowed a story to be told about dominant centers and peripheries based on the perspective of who was designing the map."

Fernandez's own cartographic works reimagine the world in entirely different ways. In her piece "Island Universe," the seven continents spread across the wall in a topsy-turvy horizontal chain, as if the entire globe had been carefully peeled open like an orange. Another work, "Archipelago (Cervix)," reconfigures more than 700 Caribbean islands into the shape of a cervix, directly invoking the brutal history of colonial violence against women in the region.

These visual transformations create a deliberately disorienting effect that forces viewers to abandon familiar geographical reference points and, with them, the cultural hierarchies these references support. "They have to change their frame of mind in order to really see it," Fernandez explained.

At her Seoul exhibition, Fernandez presents this vision through what she describes as "stacked landscapes." Rather than depicting literal geographical features, the exhibition's centerpiece "Liquid Horizon" offers a series of sculptural abstractions created with charcoal and sand – materials that carry their own geological significance and historical memory.

"The stacking isn't just about the horizontal lines," she explained. "It's also about this idea that the more you dig, the more you peel back what you think you're seeing, the more you find the historical and cultural context of place and of materials."

Her abstract seascapes, including the piece "Nocturnal (Milk Sky)," contain hidden narratives of human migration throughout history, both voluntary journeys and forced displacement. In another powerful work, "White Phosphorous/Cobalt," nearly 3,000 glazed ceramic cubes represent two distinct substances: white phosphorus, which is manufactured and weaponized in modern warfare, and cobalt, which is extracted under brutal working conditions in Central Africa.

Despite the heavy political and historical content embedded in her work, Fernandez emphasizes that the aesthetic and emotional impact of her textured landscapes holds equal importance to their underlying messages. "In the end, I'm not making posters or slogans with political content," she noted. "I'm an artist creating experiences. I'm very interested in the quiet, subjective experiences of a viewer looking at something and trying to understand it."

Fernandez describes her artistic approach as capturing a "prepolitical state" – the moment before thoughts become externalized opinions or public declarations. "I think of it as a prepolitical state – before you externalize, before you put things in the world as an opinion or a declaration, it exists in your psyche as something that's forming."

The "Liquid Horizon" exhibition will continue at Lehmann Maupin Seoul through October 25, offering visitors the opportunity to experience Fernandez's unique perspective on how landscapes carry the weight of hidden histories.