Pleased to show Paradise Paradox, a commissioned painting displayed in the lobby of BlackRock’s Singapore headquarters. Floating holy mountains drawn from the sacred geographies of Asia are peaks that have long symbolised transcendence. Places of retreat from the chaos of empire, commerce, and conquest; refuges where the enlightened could gaze down upon the illusions of the material world in splendid isolation. In a Met museum article I read, it described Chinese landscape paintings of mountains as symbols of the State and that ink painters were codifying their expressions and concerns about the State via the expressions of how they depicted the mountains. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, oversees more than $14 trillion in client assets (a figure larger than the GDP of nearly every nation on earth) and with that comes voting power exercised on behalf of millions of beneficial owners directing capital flows that shape economies, influence policy, and nudge destinies acro...