Shahpour Pouyan's 'Wūshuǐ' exhibition at Copperfield explores cultural iconography and authenticity

Shahpour Pouyan's second exhibition at Copperfield in London, titled 'Wūshuǐ' (meaning 'polluted water' in Chinese), ran from 31 October to 15 December 2018. The show investigates landscape's political and social metaphors through mixed-media works. A central piece, 'Damavand' (2018), addresses a Tehran airport billboard error that featured Mount Fuji instead of Iran's Mount Damavand, painting Fuji upside down and ripping the canvas to expose its framework. Another work, 'Sunday Painting', reimagines Winston Churchill's Surrey home with Persian miniature techniques, while 'After 'Ruhham carries away the severed arm of the Turanian sorcerer'' removes a hero from a 16th-century miniature to empower the landscape. 'After: 'Portrait of Fath Ali Shah Qajar'' appropriates an early 19th-century miniature, revealing a Romantic-era European landscape upon the Shah's removal. The final installation, 'Authentic', includes a painting commissioned for the Beijing Biennale that Pouyan created by outsourcing to a Chinese workshop based on Google images, displayed with authenticity certificates. The exhibition critiques how fiction becomes fact through government-sanctioned art, drawing on Persian legends like the Shahnameh (c. 977–1010 AD) and cultural icons from Iran, Japan, and England.