Through private visits and public lecture, I presented a curated collection of books from collection, complemented by my artist books, field notes, and diagrams.







Fragments of conversations with Xinyi Li (New York), on orientation, displacement, movement, and embodied knowing, through multiple interfaces - from ins, wechat, email, ppt, shared doc and miro board, to gardening, plant propagation, and fermentation.



Drawing and poem from Penny Yiou Peng (Berlin), on proximity to bodies of water and bodies of 東南西北 (east, south, west and north).













Letter correspondence written in mother tongue and alien tongue with Hang Li (London), on weathering, mattering, othering, trauma, amnesia, and the precarity of borders and skins.

Offshore x Waves Across the South
Research Residency at Guangdong Times Museum
2024

The research residency expands upon my exploration of the multifaceted concept of ‘offshore.’ Over the past years, tracing the stories offshore has become my ongoing ritual of researching, re-searching, and re-positioning in erratic climates and discontinuous landscapes. Yet, this is my initial return to Guangzhou, my birthplace and homesea, as a field for diving into more intimate and nuanced narratives of personal migratory trajectories within the intersecting global undercurrents.

The residency focuses on the book collection established over the past 10 years by the Times Museum, mapping interlaced territories of corporal ecology, geo-fiction, and multiscale worlding of the ‘South. ’ The research-in-progress is presented as a curated collection of books, complemented by the artist's field notes, footage, and diagrams.

Throughout the residency, I co-created experimental mappings with three of my friends, colleagues and long-term collaborators based in different countries. They are carriers of our ongoing dialogues and companionships, through which we collectively weave Chinese diasporic positionalities with ecological thinking to articulate shared experiences and struggles that often find themselves out of place. Permeating these internal landscapes is the unique cityscape where the museum is located, serving as a snapshot of the urban evolution and decay in the Pearl River Delta since Rem Koolhaas's remarks in the early 2000s.

This residency is part of Guangdong Times Museum ‘Waves Across the South’ program, situating the museum in a habitat of southern methodologies and currents, where trust, understanding and collaboration are cultivated across institutions located in various regions, in between institutions and the artist nomads, and amongst the institutional neighbors of social practices and independent spaces. Within such diverse and dialogic ecology, diasporic imaginations and experiences in the process of southernization continue to be documented, artistic expressions and thinkings of the global south are contextualized through intimate and spontaneous encounters.