The past things
2025
Images are seamless, yet past memories are fractured. The artist cuts into the images affixed to the materials, severing the edge lines within the pictures on the panels, and uses their full body strength to refold them—folding into and reshaping past sensations. These five images—the crowd, the Guizhou highway, the charred wilderness road, the wood in the first snow, and the sandstone mountain—bear a collective memory of the physical past. Re-folded, they evoke feelings of times gone by.
The Past Things #1 People
Aluminum plate, UV print
3mm 铝板 uv 打印
200cmX160cmX250cm
2025
Gathering, pressing close, followed by encircling—collectively forming a hollow or unconscious core. Then, dislocation occurs, leaving gaps. This work deconstructs a densely populated grand festival. The author disperses the flow of people in the image along the edges obscured by the crowd, cutting it into consecutive rows of coherent lines. The crowd is stretched in a zigzag pattern along the diagonal direction of the image, unraveling the chaotic and dense mass into a single organized procession. This reassembles the crowd, reconstructing order within the image. What is reorganized is not merely an adjustment of the spectacle but a delayed reshaping of perception.
《往事,贵州高速公路 #2》
The Past, Guizhou Expressway #2
2025
铝板、UV打印Aluminum plate, UV print
60 × 65 × 70 cm
作为西南地区的高速公路基建的代表，它的复杂性远不止工程结构的复杂，其背后还代表了 2016 年–2020 这 5 年的特色形式。这段时期突飞猛进高速公路翻山搭桥，创造种种大尺度奇迹，让特殊地形的贵州省在高速公路里程位居全国第三，直到 2023 年才将狂飙的高速背后的经济问题显现。
我曾在 2011 年驾车穿过整个贵州，正反方向的车道是上下台阶排列，旁边就是悬崖峭壁，深夜无车同行时我会压中间实线行驶，避免突发情况掉下山崖，尽管我知道这是违章行为。短短 10 年间改造自然的能量让大山都吓一跳，山体像一具骨折过的躯体被扎进许多矫正器，将其包围、掰正。巨大的平行线以及远方的消失点让驾驶如同进入游戏视角，茂密森林里原本的混沌音律被钢筋水泥包裹为一个音符的符号。
Qianchun Interchange, located in Yunyan District, Guiyang, is one of the most complex flyovers in China. Following the installation of its night illuminations, this interchange rapidly became an internet-famous landmark, widely praised as "flowing musical notes."
As a monument to highway infrastructure in Southwest China, its complexity extends far beyond structural engineering. It encapsulates the defining momentum of the five years from 2016 to 2020—a period of rapid expansion during which highways cut through mountains and spanned deep chasms, erecting grand-scale miracles. This drive pushed landlocked, topographically challenging Guizhou to rank third nationwide in highway mileage, until the underlying economic strains of this reckless surge finally surfaced in 2023.
In 2011, I drove across the entirety of Guizhou. The opposing lanes stepped vertically along the mountainside, directly flanking steep cliffs. Driving late at night without another car in sight, I found myself hugging the central solid line—breaking traffic regulations simply to guard against plunging into the abyss. In just ten years, the energy exerted to master nature seemed to startle the mountains themselves; the landscape now resembles a fractured body pierced with orthopedic braces, encasing and forcing it straight. Colossal parallel lines and distant vanishing points reduce the act of driving to a video-game perspective, while the forest's original, chaotic rhythm is encased in reinforced concrete, compressed into the singular symbol of a musical note.
往事# 3 烧焦的荒路
铝板 uv 打印
ThePast #3 The Charred Wilderness Road
UV print on aluminum sheet
2025
In the local burial customs of Hunan, the final stretch of a person's life journey is swept clean—sometimes even burned away with fire to clear the last path entirely. The artist interprets this as a folding of human life: the living pack up every trace of the deceased and take it with them, bidding farewell in another form.
The past # First Snow
铝板 uv打印
Aluminum Plate UV Printing
80 × 80 × 110 cm
2025
记忆不同于照片，记忆带着温度、被风。我再次想起这张照片时它和我当时的感受有了很大出入，照片只是一部分事实，但不是全部。而全部是什么呢？我知道照片可以唤起记忆中领头的线索，回溯的时态将会综合在不同的层次 —— 在脑中，在触感中，综合整个过程。
我们在寒风中给枯木松枝、搬回工作室，劈柴，点火，感受温暖。一张照片引出一个完整的回忆，而我只记录了这张图像。我折叠的是整个回溯的感受性过程，那就是整片树林温暖了我们，整片枣树林如同一个鸟巢，树林弯弯曲曲住给柴的人。
The photo First Snow captures the first snowfall of spring 2022. It was bitter cold that day, so my neighbor, Old Nie, and I went into a jujube grove near Luohu to look for deadwood to bring back and heat the studio. The way Old Nie walked, half-hoisting the firewood, reminded me of Gustave Courbet's The Stone Breakers, so I took the shot.
Memory is unlike a photograph; memory arrives with temperature and is carried by the wind. When I recalled this photograph again, it diverged significantly from what I had felt back then. A photo is only a fragment of the truth, never the whole. But what constitutes the whole? I know that a photo can trigger a leading thread in memory, while the retrospective temporalities synthesize across different dimensions—within the mind, through the sense of touch, encompassing the entire experience.
We unfastened dead branches in the freezing wind, hauled them back to the studio, chopped the wood, lit the fire, and felt the warmth. A single photo summons an entire recollection, yet I had recorded only this static image. What I am folding is this entire perceptual process of retrospection: how the whole forest gave us warmth, how the entire jujube grove cradled us like a nest, and how its winding paths sustained those who gathered its wood.
The past # Sandstone
Aluminum plate, UV print
124 × 90 × 3 cm
2025
The work Sandstone originates from a photograph taken in the spring of 2022 at a sandstone mountain in Yinshan Talin, Changping District, Beijing. During the pandemic lockdown, roaming through wild, untamed mountains offered the sole sense of freedom. It was not until 2025 that I recalled this photograph. Wandering among the barren northern mountain woods, the sandstone strata stood out in distinct layers, like tree bark—seeming almost split-openable, an invitation to step inside and escape. This escapist impulse to "retreat and disappear" into complex reality became the genesis of this work.
I continued my method of creating ruptures within the image to open up its spatial dimensions. I outputted two UV prints featuring mirrored front-and-back images, placing them back-to-back. When the cracks between the images are opened, the ruptures of these back-to-back images mirror and interlock into each other's opened splits, constructing a nested relationship. The self-folding of a single rock resembles tectonic movement—where the deep mantle churns up to the surface—all executed within the conceptual framework of the image itself.