write
Letters from the Desert
"Letters from the Desert" is a road-and-time narrative: the artist departs from the Jiayuguan rocket launch facility and follows a route around the Badain Jaran Desert toward the rocket landing site in Ordos. A distance a rocket crosses in 10 minutes is re-stretched by the artist into a 7-day journey—one letter a day—slowly unfolding and deconstructing a time-space that is otherwise violently compressed.
On this seemingly desolate land, the human dream of space quietly takes shape. The terrain is not only endless dunes but also ruptured ecologies, an interplay of nature and technology, and the folding and transformation of time and space under extreme conditions. The route's geological and cultural markers—the cliff faces that resemble star trails, the "fragmented meteors" familiar to local herders, the contrasts between ancient rainforest minerals and the modern "forest" of wind turbines—open slits across temporal layers.
The work attempts to weave a dialogue between memory, celestial phenomena, and the future—from ancient stars to imagined interstellar horizons—turning a road a rocket crosses in an instant into a tangible, readable temporal landscape.