Van Veen & Mus are artists and designers Anke van Veen and Dik Mus, working across visual art, exhibition design, and stage design. Their practice investigates how images construct our perception of nature, reality, and time.
Rooted in a fascination with historical image-making techniques such as nineteenth-century Pepper’s Ghost illusions and museum dioramas, their work combines physical miniatures, photography, and 3D technology to build immersive environments. Carefully constructed studio landscapes expand into vast digital worlds, forming what the artists describe as new wilderness — spaces where the tangible and the virtual coexist.
In these works, wilderness is approached as both landscape and idea: a place beyond human control, recalling an origin from which humanity emerged and toward which it continues to long. Their environments propose a contemporary notion of paradise — an untouched dimension of reality that suggests the possibility of an intrinsic truth, or at least our enduring belief in one.
Nature appears not as scenery but as an active presence. Through earth, water, light, and air, emotional and psychological states unfold as landscapes shaped by cycles of transformation, loss, and renewal. Water, a recurring element in projects such as Tears of Theia, functions as both geological memory and metaphor for continuity and change.
Stage design forms a natural extension of their artistic practice. In theatrical works such as Castor et Pollux, performers, light, projection, and scenography merge into dynamic environments where narrative becomes spatial experience rather than illustration.
Across all media, Van Veen & Mus create immersive situations that invite reflection on humanity’s fragile position within the larger rhythms of nature — spaces where perception, memory, and imagination converge.