Lecture Performance
Letters from the Desert
— The No-Man 's-Land Is Not Empty
Letters from the Desert — The No-Man's-Land Is Not Empty is a road-and-time narrative work. Through a sound installation, the artist invites viewers to page through an extra-long book installation that unfolds along a timeline, while orally recounting her encounters in the desert—allowing private experience and the audience's imagination to freely intersect.
The work originates from the artist's questioning of the notion that "no-man's-land is empty." Driven by this inquiry, she traces the historical memory swept within the ten minutes between a rocket's launch and its landing, embarking on a seven-day road journey across the desert—departing from the Jiayuguan rocket launch facility, following a route around the Badain Jaran Desert, and arriving at the rocket landing site in Ordos. Through one letter per day, she slowly unfolds and deconstructs a time-space otherwise violently compressed.
On this seemingly barren land, humanity's dream of space quietly takes shape. The terrain here is not merely endless dunes, but also ruptured ecologies, an interplay of nature and technology, and the folding and transformation of time and space under extreme conditions. Along the route, geological and cultural markers—cliff faces etched like star trails, the "fragmented meteors" known to local herders, and the contrasts between ancient rainforest minerals and the modern "forest" of wind turbines—open slits across temporal strata.
*The work attempts to weave a dialogue between memory, celestial phenomena, and the future—from ancient stars to an imagined interstellar horizon—turning a path that a rocket crosses in an instant into a tangible, readable landscape of time.