Circulation of the riverbed
Sand, sugar, crystal, silicone
farming tools, broken ceramic cup, cooking utensils,
animal footprints, human footprints, 2025.
Exhibited at Ningyue's Duo Show "The Lost Landscape", Tangyao Gallery, Beijing, China.
This time a narrative about the archaeology of the riverbed.
"Walking on the riverbed after the tide has faded, the broken bricks exposed therein build my imagination of the past and present..." -- Ningyue Qian
I am very happy to present a retrospective of my important sources for riverbed archaeology in the channel from Sugar Extension, as well as presenting yet another site-specific large-scale work that is entirely new to me, a new series of mobile ceramic easel works and sculptures of silicone farm implements. I am looking forward to discover and imagine the treasures buried in the riverbed (made of sugar by Ningyue) and the animal tracks left behind.
"Walking on the riverbed after the tide has faded, the broken bricks exposed therein build my imagination of the past and present..." -- Ningyue Qian
I am very happy to present a retrospective of my important sources for riverbed archaeology in the channel from Sugar Extension, as well as presenting yet another site-specific large-scale work that is entirely new to me, a new series of mobile ceramic easel works and sculptures of silicone farm implements. I am looking forward to discover and imagine the treasures buried in the riverbed (made of sugar by Ningyue) and the animal tracks left behind.
Installation Diagram
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The growth of a radish
Antique furniture, radishes.
45 x 45 x 165 cm, 2025.
Circulation of the arm implements
Silicone
130 x 30 cm / 120 x 30 cm / 150 x 30 cm, 2025.
Archaeology and Competition. (Performance)
Riverbeds, Archaeology, and Competition
Yifan Li
The artificial lighting that once delineated the boundary between artwork and audience suddenly dims. Accompanied by the lingering echoes of a ship's horn in the semi-open space, Qian Ningyue is summoned into the interior of Riverbeds—a large-scale sculpture once held at a distance from viewers. From the moment she gently brushes against the scattered gravel at the edges to when her body is gradually enveloped by the contours of the riverbed, she begins to shed the layers of symbolic markers that the exhibition's network had constructed to identify her as the artist, Qian Ningyue.
In the rhythm formed by the interplay of light and water, formerly rigid boundaries begin to shift. It is through the collaboration of vision, material, and technology that a slow recalibration of perception unfolds, leading us into a mental topography composed of the riverbed, body, and the environment. Just as every form of writing has its own textual conventions and limitations, so too does the body— mapping the temporal order of seeing and the spatial logic of movement. Water rises, the body sinks, events begin to layer. And so, we collectively enter a brief, ambiguous dream.
But what constitutes this collective? From Ningyue's perspective, the fragments scattered across the riverbed are not static relics to be reconstructed, but imaginative glimpses of past and future. These pieces cease to be mere indicators of linear time; they become vessels of potential intervention. As the dream unfolds, she pushes aside the riverbed with her hands to pick up the treasures; she pulls out a hoe-shaped tool embedded deep in the sediment and turns to dig; she stumbles across the terrain, selecting objects that catch her eye, then hesitates on higher ground, looking back toward us. As the site's sonic textures intensify toward crescendo, can we still distinguish whether her gestures are archaeological? Or competitive? Every dream reveals a kind of truth.
To borrow Heidegger's words, "distinction itself is the source of threat." Our uncertainty over the nature of her actions reveals a shadow that cuts through ecological, economic, affective, and social dimensions. This shadow urges both Qian Ningyue and the viewer to reexamine the nature of relationships- between human and object, body and technology, individual and collective- and points toward the evolving trajectory of these bonds.
The dream ends with three blasts of the ship's horn. Qian Ningyue is always pulled back by this distant summons. Whatever the act, she must be the one to lead us out. Sometimes she slides down from the riverbed's crest; other times she carefully lays down the tool she once raised overhead. Regardless, she gathers the scattered fragments of her identity, piece by piece, from body to toes. The riverbed and its fragments are again rendered into observable past events. And she, once more, becomes the artist among the crowd.
Distance is often cast as failure, as weakness. But as Johnson (2020) proposes in Mekong Dreaming, power arises from distance not merely as physical detachment, but as epistemic tension. And the moment we awaken from the dream is the very moment in which we reconnect with each other, and with the shifting architecture of past and future.