WanderingTill The Wind Whispers My Land
Wandering is not merely a journey through time and space, but an act of inhabiting thresholds—where identity, memory, and belonging remain in constant negotiation, much like standing where the shoreline meets the tide. Here, the wind enters not as metaphor but as what Jane Bennett calls a vibrant matter1—a non-human agent with its own vitality, a restless carrier of unstable messages and fractured perceptions. It drifts without destination, slipping past borders, unsettling language, and reconfiguring sensory boundaries. In this way, the wind becomes both method and material—disrupting containment and opening pathways for connections across places, species, and forms of knowing.
This exhibition embraces “unbecoming” as both a curatorial method and a lived condition. In the spirit of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject2, wandering here is not a symptom of being lost, but a refusal of closure—an insistence on remaining in motion, unrooted and porous, open to continual transformation. For diasporic Chinese artists moving between shifting borders, fractured languages, and intimate dislocations, unbecoming offers a generative counter to fixed narratives of identity or homeland. Their works chart emotional cartographies that refuse linear arrival—maps woven from sidelong paths, reverberations, and folds in time.
Here, theory gives way to encounter. Moving through sound, image, gesture, soil, and breath, the artists in this exhibition explore what Stacy Alaimo describes as trans-corporeality3,4—the porous entanglement of human bodies with the material world—showing how meaning takes shape when language gives way. A retired soprano sings a national song, its melody fracturing at the height of emotion. A printer spills streams of trade data until they dissolve into noise. A body converses through plants and heartbeats. A voice, caught on cassette, drifts into the hands of strangers. These are less representations than enactments—rituals through which memory slips its frame, mutates, and returns in altered form.
Rather than presenting home as a place of origin or return, this exhibition follows Donna Haraway’s call to stay with the trouble5: what if home is what moves with the wind? Belonging, here, is not a fixed destination but a momentary anchoring in the flow. In the sonic thresholds and visual afterimages that remain, we encounter a fractured poetics—loss that does not seek repair, but stays alive in its disassembly, always moving, always becoming.
Notes:
1 Bennett, Jane.
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
2 Braidotti, Rosi.
Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. (2nd edition: New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.)
3 Alaimo, Stacy.
Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
4 Alaimo, Stacy.
Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
5 Haraway, Donna.
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Curated by
Daisy Di Wang
Participating Artist
Fan Bangyu
Gao Chang
Li Gang
Zhou Gongmo
Feng Mingyue
Li Yilei
Yang Qinlin
Yao Qingmei
In Collaboration with
Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop
Location
Unit 1, 1 Bard Rd, London W10 6TP
Private View
19th September 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Exhibition
19th September - 18th October 2025
Wednesday - Saturday 11:00 am - 5:00 pm