February 16, 2024

COAL + ICE at Asia Society, February 13 – August 11, 2024

“Climate change takes center stage at Asia Society with the presentation of COAL + ICE, an immersive photography and video exhibition taking place February 13 through August 11, 2024. The exhibition will be accompanied by a multidisciplinary program series, with performances and activations throughout the city, designed to raise awareness and catalyze responses to the climate crisis.

Encompassing work by over 30 photographers and artists from around the world, the exhibition traces a photographic arc of climate change spanning the past century, from deep within coal mines, to the melting glaciers of the greater Himalaya. Greenhouse gases are warming the high-altitude climate of the Tibetan Plateau, disturbing the great rivers of Asia and disrupting the lives of billions of people downstream. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events are highlighted in the exhibition by an immersive presentation of the video installation Deluge by Gideon Mendel, documenting flooding around the world.  

COAL + ICE is a collaborative visual experience that calls attention to the urgent global issue of climate change. Through intimate portraits and vast, altered landscapes, the works on view document the consequences triggered by our continued reliance on fossil fuels, and bring to life the environmental and human costs of climate change, in Asia and around the world. The exhibition will be presented across four floors of Asia Society, and will culminate with a series of projects by photographers, artists, and designers who foreground a range of differently scaled solutions to the climate crisis including an installation on renewable energy by Jamey Stillings.” — Asia Society.

Camille Seaman, Iceberg in Blood Red Sea, Lemaire Channel, Antarctica, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
Clifford Ross, Nazare Wave IX, Portugal, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Darcy Padilla, California, USA, 2017. Courtesy of the artist/Agence VU’.
David Breashears, Mount Everest, Main Rongbuk Glacier, Tibet, China, 2007. Courtesy of GlacierWorks.
Meridith Kohut, Mexico, 2019.
Gideon Mendel, Muhammad Chuttal Korai, Pakistan, 2022.
Lewis Hine, Pennsylvania, USA, 1911. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Jimmy Chin, Mount Everest, Main Rongbuk Glacier, Tibet, China, 2007. Courtesy of GlacierWorks.
Jamey Stillings, Valle de los Vientos, Atacama Desert, Chile, #40758, 1 September 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Nichole Sobecki, Somalia, 2016. Courtesy of VII.
Geng Yunsheng, Yunnan Province, China, 2002.

Co-curated by Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and exhibition designer Jeroen de Vries, and led by Orville Schell, Asia Society Vice President and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, the exhibition has evolved since its initial premiere in Beijing in 2011. Each photographer’s commitment to capturing our changing environment and its human toll is reflected in imagery curated from their long-term, authored bodies of work.

Images courtesy Asia Society.