A Thousand Waystations
Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the group exhibition 鈥淎 Thousand Waystations鈥�, which will be held from April 26th to June 18th, 2025, at its Beijing 2nd Space. Curated by Fiona Lu, the exhibition brings together works by Li Binyuan, Li Qing, Liu Yujia, Shang Yang, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Wang Du, Xue Feng, Yue Minjun, Zhang Jian and Zheng Guogu.
The "Waystation," interpreted as an arrival forever in process, serves simultaneously as the capillary system of ancient empires and a temporary anchor point in our era of flux; it is both a relic of history and a seed for the future. In a time when GPS carves the world into centimeter-scale grids, humanity paradoxically finds itself adrift in unprecedented disorientation. The "borderless" myth woven by capital and algorithms seeks to flatten all geographical folds. Here, the "Waystation" is reimagined as a strategy of resistance, transmuting into a non-hierarchical geographical poetics. Spanning from Deleuze's rhizome network to the neural impulses of the digital age, from salt stains on the desolate wilderness to data dust in the cloud, the works of ten artists in this exhibition are like layers of temporary coordinates scattered across the earth, marking the migration trajectories of body, data, nature, culture, and spirit. Beneath the smoothed surface of a certain globalization, they carve out untamed folds. This is neither a point of origin nor a final destination, but a critical threshold where countless possibilities erupt, signaling the nomadic destiny ingrained in human genes.
Li Binyuan's Performance on the Windowsill transforms the windowsill into a micro-landscape. At the foot of the mountains and in the fields near his hometown, using abandoned window frames as a backdrop, his physical body seems to become a surrogate for surveying instruments. Through the body's contortions, extensions, and falls, he inscribes a geo-love letter untouched by digitization, addressed to those who still believe the body can measure the land, akin to temporary boundary markers etched by urban nomads with their body temperature. This primal bodily narrative enters into a subtle dialogue with the old-fashioned wooden armchair entangled with silicone tubes in Sun Yuan & Peng Yu's Dear, where technology dissects intimate relationships into replaceable organ components. The cage woven by modern society with systems, technology, and emotion enacts a gentle confinement in the name of "love." When mechanical tubes lash bulletproof glass with "controlled violence," the secure perimeters built by capital and technology expose their true nature, alienating human resistance into a mere spectacle. The body, in turn, becomes the softest yet most resilient fold in this power struggle.
As Yellow Pages and maps are relegated to the status of cultural fossils in the digital age, Wang Du and Li Qing choose to revive the nomadic ideal of vision upon ruins. Wang Du's Yellow Pages, using 30,000 uncropped snapshots, converts the traditional phone book's information indexing function into an experiment on the migration of visual media. The conventional Yellow Pages, an information waystation of the industrial era, carried structured data like addresses and numbers, serving as a geographical indexing tool for a sedentary society. Wang Du strips away its textual content, substituting it with 30,000 images captured under the principles of "no framing, no seeking novelty, no setting conditions," thereby accomplishing a gentle subversion of media power: As precise coordinates like phone numbers and house numbers are replaced by blurry street scenes, incidental passersby, and fragments of the mundane, the information carrier evolves from "navigational precise guidance" into "nomadic visual wandering." Li Qing's work In the Cloud is far from a simple documentation of urban landscapes; it reconstructs the geographical genes of contemporary China. The spherical and oval structures suspended atop buildings, colliding with old-style cubical window frames, form an encrypted geographical codebook. The spheres crowning six buildings constitute the nodes of what Deleuze termed "smooth space," aiming to transform the city into a seamless docking network for global capital. But Li Qing uses old-style cubical window frames to cleave through this, tearing open a rift on the smooth facade of globalized architecture, allowing spatial memories from disparate eras to coexist as superimposed images, thus implanting cultural genes unlocatable by GPS coordinates into the very DNA chain of capitalist architecture.
Zheng Guogu's Brain Neural Lines fuses the wisdom of Bible from over two thousand years ago with the neural impulses of the cyborg. Within the manifest topography of neural folds, his work confronts the algorithmic compression of human consciousness by technology, yet preserves the potential for spiritual migration within the synaptic gaps. The abstract diagrams representing the Jesus and his twelve apostles from the scriptures are reimagined as nomadic pathways for neural synapses, implying that spiritual cultivation, much like digital existence, necessitates "waystation-like" leaps. This metaphor of cognitive nomadism achieves visual articulation in the works of Yue Minjun. Here, Taihu stones feature as "isolated islands emerging from the water," representing both the material formations of geological folds and a spatial metaphor for spiritual exile. Traditionally, these stones embody the literati's ideal microcosm鈥攚here "a fist-sized rock stands in for a mountain, a ladle of water evokes a river"鈥� but Yue Minjun divests them of this natural context, repositioning them as spiritual waystations within modern society. As the process of urbanization compresses humanity into symbolic prisoners on "isolated islands," those untamed, absurd smiles, those chance collisions with traditional spiritual totems, that physical balance maintained in isolation 鈥攖hey refuse to become fixed semantic anchors, yet each time they are gazed upon, they reactivate humanity's primal yearning for spiritual freedom.
Xue Feng contributes two architectural installations. The first invokes the sacredness of folklore; symbols like pearls, thread, and King Gesar form a spiritual waystation reflective of nomadic civilization. The second addresses the materiality of urban replication, where standardized architecture, industrial materials, and capitalist branding demarcate the violent coordinates of modernity. His painting, Silent, Silent, Silent, employs a threefold layering of "silence" to turn the canvas into a geological radar probing the contemporary zeitgeist. Through the physical accumulation of paint and the visualization of psychological energy, this large-scale piece forges a hidden channel between informational cacophony and natural wilderness, linking the individual psyche to the predicaments of the age. Zhang Jian's landscape paintings render natural scenery as vessels holding collective memory and individual experience. The human-nature relationship thus transcends abstract proposition, becoming a tangible, warm, temporary point of dwelling. When sedentary society alienates nature, reducing it to a consumable object or decorative motif, the quietly proliferating flora on canvas, or ski trails winding through snowy peaks, evoke humanity's most fundamental conception of "home"鈥攐ne experienced while in migration. This sense of home resides not in fixed geographical coordinates but in the fleeting emotional tremor, interweaving beauty and sorrow, that arises with each encounter with nature.
As modernity's bulldozer levels the textures of the natural world, Shang Yang and Liu Yujia salvage civilizational remnants from within geological folds. Shang Yang's Painting of Remaining Water, combining a visual grammar of geological stratification with poetic metaphors of ecological crisis, functions as a crucial nexus connecting the traumas of nature and civilization. It smelts historical cross-sections of the Three Gorges Project, the material debris of industrial ruins, and the spiritual DNA of traditional "Shanshui" painting into a fluid geological monument. Within the fissures of time, it reveals the "remaining waters and remnant mountains" crushed by modernity, offering contemporary spiritual migrants a space for temporary anchorage. Liu Yujia's Pale View of Distant Hills unfolds like a parchment map weathered by wind and sand. Employing an almost anthropological austerity alongside a poetic gaze, it reconstructs the borderland as a temporary mooring point encompassing multiple temporalities. Through spatial conflict, the ambiguity between fiction and documentary, and the paradoxical presence of the female protagonist as a kind of "living evidence," the work exposes the complex essence of the frontier as a "waystation" within globalization鈥攗nderscoring that the borderland has never been merely a peripheral zone on a map. When the protagonist extinguishes the electric light at the film's conclusion, she isn't returning to darkness but rather illuminating another provisional waystation. These spontaneously emergent points of light, existing outside the globalized grid, constitute the true, innumerable coordinates.
The purported "waystation" is never a static structure but an ever-flowing relationship. True belonging is found not in GPS-defined coordinates, but in the vibratory encounter with these folds鈥攁n instinctive bodily response, a timeless spiritual yearning for fluidity. Beneath the hardened surface woven by capital and technology, these untamed folds proliferate. They are civilization's growth rings, the embryos of the future, awaiting the next migratory footfall, ready to interconnect the infinite possibilities across a thousand waystations.
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Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the group exhibition 鈥淎 Thousand Waystations鈥�, which will be held from April 26th to June 18th, 2025, at its Beijing 2nd Space. Curated by Fiona Lu, the exhibition brings together works by Li Binyuan, Li Qing, Liu Yujia, Shang Yang, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Wang Du, Xue Feng, Yue Minjun, Zhang Jian and Zheng Guogu.
The "Waystation," interpreted as an arrival forever in process, serves simultaneously as the capillary system of ancient empires and a temporary anchor point in our era of flux; it is both a relic of history and a seed for the future. In a time when GPS carves the world into centimeter-scale grids, humanity paradoxically finds itself adrift in unprecedented disorientation. The "borderless" myth woven by capital and algorithms seeks to flatten all geographical folds. Here, the "Waystation" is reimagined as a strategy of resistance, transmuting into a non-hierarchical geographical poetics. Spanning from Deleuze's rhizome network to the neural impulses of the digital age, from salt stains on the desolate wilderness to data dust in the cloud, the works of ten artists in this exhibition are like layers of temporary coordinates scattered across the earth, marking the migration trajectories of body, data, nature, culture, and spirit. Beneath the smoothed surface of a certain globalization, they carve out untamed folds. This is neither a point of origin nor a final destination, but a critical threshold where countless possibilities erupt, signaling the nomadic destiny ingrained in human genes.
Li Binyuan's Performance on the Windowsill transforms the windowsill into a micro-landscape. At the foot of the mountains and in the fields near his hometown, using abandoned window frames as a backdrop, his physical body seems to become a surrogate for surveying instruments. Through the body's contortions, extensions, and falls, he inscribes a geo-love letter untouched by digitization, addressed to those who still believe the body can measure the land, akin to temporary boundary markers etched by urban nomads with their body temperature. This primal bodily narrative enters into a subtle dialogue with the old-fashioned wooden armchair entangled with silicone tubes in Sun Yuan & Peng Yu's Dear, where technology dissects intimate relationships into replaceable organ components. The cage woven by modern society with systems, technology, and emotion enacts a gentle confinement in the name of "love." When mechanical tubes lash bulletproof glass with "controlled violence," the secure perimeters built by capital and technology expose their true nature, alienating human resistance into a mere spectacle. The body, in turn, becomes the softest yet most resilient fold in this power struggle.
As Yellow Pages and maps are relegated to the status of cultural fossils in the digital age, Wang Du and Li Qing choose to revive the nomadic ideal of vision upon ruins. Wang Du's Yellow Pages, using 30,000 uncropped snapshots, converts the traditional phone book's information indexing function into an experiment on the migration of visual media. The conventional Yellow Pages, an information waystation of the industrial era, carried structured data like addresses and numbers, serving as a geographical indexing tool for a sedentary society. Wang Du strips away its textual content, substituting it with 30,000 images captured under the principles of "no framing, no seeking novelty, no setting conditions," thereby accomplishing a gentle subversion of media power: As precise coordinates like phone numbers and house numbers are replaced by blurry street scenes, incidental passersby, and fragments of the mundane, the information carrier evolves from "navigational precise guidance" into "nomadic visual wandering." Li Qing's work In the Cloud is far from a simple documentation of urban landscapes; it reconstructs the geographical genes of contemporary China. The spherical and oval structures suspended atop buildings, colliding with old-style cubical window frames, form an encrypted geographical codebook. The spheres crowning six buildings constitute the nodes of what Deleuze termed "smooth space," aiming to transform the city into a seamless docking network for global capital. But Li Qing uses old-style cubical window frames to cleave through this, tearing open a rift on the smooth facade of globalized architecture, allowing spatial memories from disparate eras to coexist as superimposed images, thus implanting cultural genes unlocatable by GPS coordinates into the very DNA chain of capitalist architecture.
Zheng Guogu's Brain Neural Lines fuses the wisdom of Bible from over two thousand years ago with the neural impulses of the cyborg. Within the manifest topography of neural folds, his work confronts the algorithmic compression of human consciousness by technology, yet preserves the potential for spiritual migration within the synaptic gaps. The abstract diagrams representing the Jesus and his twelve apostles from the scriptures are reimagined as nomadic pathways for neural synapses, implying that spiritual cultivation, much like digital existence, necessitates "waystation-like" leaps. This metaphor of cognitive nomadism achieves visual articulation in the works of Yue Minjun. Here, Taihu stones feature as "isolated islands emerging from the water," representing both the material formations of geological folds and a spatial metaphor for spiritual exile. Traditionally, these stones embody the literati's ideal microcosm鈥攚here "a fist-sized rock stands in for a mountain, a ladle of water evokes a river"鈥� but Yue Minjun divests them of this natural context, repositioning them as spiritual waystations within modern society. As the process of urbanization compresses humanity into symbolic prisoners on "isolated islands," those untamed, absurd smiles, those chance collisions with traditional spiritual totems, that physical balance maintained in isolation 鈥攖hey refuse to become fixed semantic anchors, yet each time they are gazed upon, they reactivate humanity's primal yearning for spiritual freedom.
Xue Feng contributes two architectural installations. The first invokes the sacredness of folklore; symbols like pearls, thread, and King Gesar form a spiritual waystation reflective of nomadic civilization. The second addresses the materiality of urban replication, where standardized architecture, industrial materials, and capitalist branding demarcate the violent coordinates of modernity. His painting, Silent, Silent, Silent, employs a threefold layering of "silence" to turn the canvas into a geological radar probing the contemporary zeitgeist. Through the physical accumulation of paint and the visualization of psychological energy, this large-scale piece forges a hidden channel between informational cacophony and natural wilderness, linking the individual psyche to the predicaments of the age. Zhang Jian's landscape paintings render natural scenery as vessels holding collective memory and individual experience. The human-nature relationship thus transcends abstract proposition, becoming a tangible, warm, temporary point of dwelling. When sedentary society alienates nature, reducing it to a consumable object or decorative motif, the quietly proliferating flora on canvas, or ski trails winding through snowy peaks, evoke humanity's most fundamental conception of "home"鈥攐ne experienced while in migration. This sense of home resides not in fixed geographical coordinates but in the fleeting emotional tremor, interweaving beauty and sorrow, that arises with each encounter with nature.
As modernity's bulldozer levels the textures of the natural world, Shang Yang and Liu Yujia salvage civilizational remnants from within geological folds. Shang Yang's Painting of Remaining Water, combining a visual grammar of geological stratification with poetic metaphors of ecological crisis, functions as a crucial nexus connecting the traumas of nature and civilization. It smelts historical cross-sections of the Three Gorges Project, the material debris of industrial ruins, and the spiritual DNA of traditional "Shanshui" painting into a fluid geological monument. Within the fissures of time, it reveals the "remaining waters and remnant mountains" crushed by modernity, offering contemporary spiritual migrants a space for temporary anchorage. Liu Yujia's Pale View of Distant Hills unfolds like a parchment map weathered by wind and sand. Employing an almost anthropological austerity alongside a poetic gaze, it reconstructs the borderland as a temporary mooring point encompassing multiple temporalities. Through spatial conflict, the ambiguity between fiction and documentary, and the paradoxical presence of the female protagonist as a kind of "living evidence," the work exposes the complex essence of the frontier as a "waystation" within globalization鈥攗nderscoring that the borderland has never been merely a peripheral zone on a map. When the protagonist extinguishes the electric light at the film's conclusion, she isn't returning to darkness but rather illuminating another provisional waystation. These spontaneously emergent points of light, existing outside the globalized grid, constitute the true, innumerable coordinates.
The purported "waystation" is never a static structure but an ever-flowing relationship. True belonging is found not in GPS-defined coordinates, but in the vibratory encounter with these folds鈥攁n instinctive bodily response, a timeless spiritual yearning for fluidity. Beneath the hardened surface woven by capital and technology, these untamed folds proliferate. They are civilization's growth rings, the embryos of the future, awaiting the next migratory footfall, ready to interconnect the infinite possibilities across a thousand waystations.
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