planes
two-channel video installation. projector and tv, clay sound device, speakers, soil. 2025Planes (2025) attempt to connect different time and space with moving-image and sound, using tree roots and mycelium as a metaphor, linking up past and future, memories and current conditions. This work also looks back at the protest bursted out in Shanghai at the end of 2022, which catalysed the closure of COVID lockdowns and mobility controls in China. A sense of exile and forgetting kept haunting me in the years after I fled Shanghai to London. Remembrance found its way out in this installation.
The London plane trees in the work become portals, transmitting back-and-forth lived experience and forgotten sensation. Memories became present, and the future became history. Meanwhile, a mushroom-shaped sound installation anchored everything in the time and space where the installation is located.
Edward Said wrote about exile: it is the unsealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home. Its essential sadness can never be surmounted. Artist Do Ho Suh talked about home and time: we think of ourselves as living in the present, but in reality we’re living in the past. We’re bound to always go back to the past, to the same area of interest, the same kinds of thoughts.
Perhaps in an entity of time, nothing comes before or after, everything is the cause and the result at the same time. All exchanges of memories and sensations are entangled.
watch here
shown at:
Basement, Conditions. 28-30 March 2025. London