INTERSTITIAL TERRITORIES - 游移疆域

Preface:

Interstitial Territories explores the concepts of in-between spaces and fractured narratives in contemporary art practice—spaces that exist within gaps, thresholds, and ruptures, neither fully here nor there. These interstitial zones are sites of tension, where memory erodes and reforms, identity is suspended and reconstituted, and historical traces fade while simultaneously being reactivated.

Drawing from Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the “Third Space” and Jacques Derrida’s concept of “Hauntology,” the exhibition examines how artists engage with histories, everyday experiences, and speculative futures to reveal cultural and personal fragments that have been erased, obscured, or displaced. These interstitial territories do not belong to fixed temporalities; they signal both unrealized histories and futures that remain perpetually deferred.

Within these spaces, memory no longer operates as a linear remnant of the past but instead unfolds as a constantly shifting “present”; images and identities emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure through acts of inscription and erasure. Through installations, text, painting, and mixed media, the participating artists activate these interstitial territories, bringing to light the suppressed, fractured, or overlooked dimensions of cultural and individual experience.

Fractures and Reconstructions of History: Jiaqi Lyu

Jiaqi Lyu takes anonymous online imagery and overlooked archival materials to construct a “disjunctive historiography”, exploring the spectral relationship between unrealized histories and futures that can never be fully reached. Echoing Derrida’s discussion of “archive fever”, Lyu’s work questions the authority that dictates historical narratives, revealing counter-histories that challenge hegemonic structures and storytelling.

The Interstice Between Nature and Culture: Yan Wu

Yan Wu’s work deconstructs traditional Chinese representations of nature, revealing its function as an interstitial site between history and culture. By employing l’entre (interstitiality) as a conceptual framework, she detaches literati rocks and flora from their conventional symbolic roles and situates them between tradition and contemporaneity.

Ruptures and the Becoming of Identity: Yuyang(Lily)Wei

Yuyang(Lily)Wei examines cross-cultural and transnational experiences, exploring the fractured identity formation of Third Culture Kids (TCKs). Informed by Homi K. Bhabha’s Third Space theory, her work interrogates how diasporic individuals navigate between the binaries of “homeland” and “otherness”, revealing the fluidity and instability of cultural belonging in the globalized era.

Recontextualizing Images of Power: Ren Yao

Ren Yao examines contemporary society’s veneration of secular icons—celebrities, political leaders, and corporate figures—by recontextualizing these images within Buddhist and Taoist frameworks. This process of critical recontextualization highlights how power is continually constructed, commodified, and ritualized through visual culture. The work raises a crucial question: as power becomes ever more decentralized in appearance, does it in fact coalesce into new centers of authority and myth-making?

Recontextualizing Materials and Space: Ziling Yu

Ziling Yu explores the displacement and reconfiguration of architectural materials across different spatial and cultural contexts. By deconstructing and re-situating architectural forms embedded in specific historical and geographic frameworks, she reveals how materials function as carriers of cultural memory, subject to processes of decoding, recoding, and meaning-making as they transition across different spatial and historical registers. Yu’s practice engages with Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), interrogating the instability of memory and its transformations across contexts.

Bodies, Desire, and the Invocation of Futures: Moses Tan

Moses Tan’s work engages with symbols such as braided hair and the nine-tailed fox to explore the intricate relationship between identity, desire, and power. Through the deconstruction of cultural iconography, his practice reveals how queer identity navigates between sociopolitical constraints and the speculative possibilities of futurity. By working with materials that evoke both fragility and indeterminacy, Tan’s work challenges normative frameworks of identity and presents an imaginative critique of future queer subjectivities.

Nonlinear Translations of the Image: Yiming Zhuang

Yiming Zhuang’s work interrogates the complex relationship between human agency and machinic autonomy, drawing upon Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory to reveal how technology emerges as an active agent in the creative process. Beginning with a photographic image, the work undergoes two stages of AI-generated transformation, progressively eroding traces of human presence and replacing them with algorithmic distortions. This process ultimately culminates in the dissolution of anthropocentric representation, producing a “semiotic disruption” that challenges the conventional understanding of artistic authorship.

The Erosion and Rewriting of Memory: Tianjing Chang

Tianjing Chang inscribed Lanting Xu onto stone surfaces, allowing the rain to gradually wash away the text until it disappeared entirely. In another installation, a toppled table and a suspended chair evoke temporal and spatial dislocation, where the objects that once functioned as stable carriers of memory are destabilized and freed from their original contexts. Positioned within a liminal state between erasure and inscription, the work suggests that memory is neither fixed nor linear—it is continuously rewritten, subject to forces of dissolution and regeneration.

Preface:

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