2023

Installation views of the exhibition at FLIP POP, Shanghai, 2023

In the past three years, Qianshan and her companions have explored their hometown Foochow(Fuzhou) and its surrounding areas, building an archive with images as records to preserve her intuitive feelings and thoughts about the hometown after a long absence. For a person like her who’s not bonded with the native clanship, Fujian is a place that’s sometimes vaguely romantic, yet abruptly enlightening. Surrounded by the stretching mountains and facing against the ocean, the narratives born out of here are incoherent yet diverse; whereas the persisting folk culture continuously infuses a vitality disparate from modern China.

Wandering among the old banyan trees, churches, temples, wharves and scattered isles, strands of diffused narratives weave together a centerless net, linking the history and the present, as well as earth and gods. This land taught Qianshan how to equilibrate between the micro and the macro - to perceive the greater picture through the tiny bits; a mustard seed may contain Mount Meru, just like the tiny shrines found everywhere in Fujian that are housing the dense faith from the neighborhoods.

This project at FLIPPOP is her attempt to reconstruct the visual memory of her perception of the homeland unconventionally by extracting the key imageries from the archive. Through this project, she hopes to set off some ripples over the viewer’s experience.