In landscape photography, the horizon line—that inevitable meeting place of earth and sky—is inexorable. Consider early panoramic daguerreotypes by figures such as Friedrich von Martens and William Southgate Porter, the former of the Seine in Paris, 1845, the latter of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Water Works, 1848. But while the horizon line may always appear in such images, it is rare to find cases in which it is a work’s explicit focus, the photo’s raison d’être. This is in no small part what makes Sze Tsung Leong’s images so striking. The twenty-nine color works that were on display here, uniform in scale (twenty-eight by forty-eight inches), stand in worshipful contemplation of the earth’s edge—a line, and with Leong it is almost always a line, without the slightest hint of curvature, where land abruptly ends and the wide-open sky (that is, heaven) begins.

Leong’s work is peculiarly sober and solemn, with the earth (which occupies the bottom third of the image) serving as a sort of pedestal on which the immaterial sky is mounted. The landscape is generally empty and barren, desertlike (Masai Mara I and Tsavo West III, both 2009, and Victorville, California, 2006) even when it is green (Avebury I, 2002) or composed largely of water (Antelope Valley, California, 2006; Fláajökull, Iceland, 2007). There’s a certain austere innocence about these scenes: They show nature at its most materially elemental. Other works depict cities. In such photos, skies of pure blinding-white light rise dismissively over worldly if tired earth-brownish urban landscapes huddled below them. See, for example, Quartier Latin, Paris, 2008, and La Habana Vieja II, 2010: Their eponymous cities never more than an incidental sliver of the picture, even when their buildings reach for the sky, as the Chicago skyscrapers on the shore of Lake Michigan, 2012, futilely attempt to do. In comparison to the profane, cluttered, and petty urban areas, the sacred sky is magnificent.

The distance from which Leong shoots his subjects helps imbue them with their faraway “mystic” look. Reality is tentative, making only a token material appearance. This is especially true of Leong’s seascapes, among them Odoi, Nishi-lzu, Shizuoka, 2008; Baie du Mont Saint-Michel I, 2009; and the Salar de Uyuni, 2010, works. The sky and the sea are equally luminous and mirror each other; they could easily become one. The horizon is only vaguely implied—at most it’s a shadowy thin line, a barely perceptible incident in the pure light and space, a bit of static in their absolute silence. Color has all but disappeared, and light has bested—almost ousted—shadow. Generally, Leong’s images have a certain Minimalist sparseness and sameness. Although the artist has traveled to and photographed many places, the formal qualities of such images are remarkably similar, suggesting that the beyond is always the same, wherever it is experienced.

—Donald Kuspit