DRIFTING INTO DUNES
Performance Video 2025
Drifting into Dunes centers on an abandoned wooden boat found in Jiangzhou, a riverside village along the Yangtze River. Once a vessel for human migration, it now lies decaying in silence, embedded in the riverbank sand and slowly merging with its surroundings. Filmed over several days through two stages of performance, the work explores the transformation of material through time, the threshold between repair and disappearance, and the reconfiguration of existence in an age shaped by technology. The body moves between acts of restoration and burial, questioning how time alters being and how humans intervene, witness, and redefine meaning.
In the first stage, I slowly fill the boat’s hollow with sand, attempting to mend its emptiness. Sand becomes both a medium of support and a force of erosion. It gives form and devours it; it constructs and buries. In the second stage, I wrap the boat in layers of transparent plastic film, attempting to preserve a still slice of time. Once removed, the plastic reveals the boat’s outline imprinted in the sand—a negative form, a transferred body, the faint residue of time.
Through slow gesture, an ambiguous temporal imprint takes shape. Repair becomes a prelude to disappearance, preservation a gesture of substitution. In an era of constant material shifts, dissolving boundaries, and rapid technological renewal, can we still recognize the essence of a thing? When the remnants of the past are patched over, replaced, sealed away, is our perception of reality quietly drifting with them? When presence is archived as data, does it begin to erode?
Entangled in both sand and plastic, forgetting and remembering nest within each other, imprint and shell become mirrors. What ultimately remains—is it a silent, blurred fossil of time?
Performance Video 2025
Drifting into Dunes centers on an abandoned wooden boat found in Jiangzhou, a riverside village along the Yangtze River. Once a vessel for human migration, it now lies decaying in silence, embedded in the riverbank sand and slowly merging with its surroundings. Filmed over several days through two stages of performance, the work explores the transformation of material through time, the threshold between repair and disappearance, and the reconfiguration of existence in an age shaped by technology. The body moves between acts of restoration and burial, questioning how time alters being and how humans intervene, witness, and redefine meaning.
In the first stage, I slowly fill the boat’s hollow with sand, attempting to mend its emptiness. Sand becomes both a medium of support and a force of erosion. It gives form and devours it; it constructs and buries. In the second stage, I wrap the boat in layers of transparent plastic film, attempting to preserve a still slice of time. Once removed, the plastic reveals the boat’s outline imprinted in the sand—a negative form, a transferred body, the faint residue of time.
Through slow gesture, an ambiguous temporal imprint takes shape. Repair becomes a prelude to disappearance, preservation a gesture of substitution. In an era of constant material shifts, dissolving boundaries, and rapid technological renewal, can we still recognize the essence of a thing? When the remnants of the past are patched over, replaced, sealed away, is our perception of reality quietly drifting with them? When presence is archived as data, does it begin to erode?
Entangled in both sand and plastic, forgetting and remembering nest within each other, imprint and shell become mirrors. What ultimately remains—is it a silent, blurred fossil of time?