Searching and Oberving,
Then Falling Back to Earth
Text / Li Suchao
Meta Eye 11/2025
Long Pan’s video installation Atmospheric Folds (2025) unfolds layered symbolic narratives from the trajectories of ore and spores, the overlap of ancient ruins and rocket launch sites, and the process by which rocket debris is reabsorbed by nature. She recalls fieldwork in the northwest, searching for fragments, and making a solo circuit from the Jiuquan launch center across the desert to observe the landscape shaped by rocket launches and landings. Ten minutes before a booster fell they waited in place until a streak of smoke from the descending stage crossed the sky; that intense compression of time and space sparked her boundless imaginings of debris threading airflows and temporal folds. On finding rocket wreckage she saw metal folds scorched and melted by atmospheric friction, as if precision technology had been returned to its raw ore state. This reminded her of what she had seen in southwestern mining areas: “Those ores and fungi may both have journeys to the clouds, yet their fates after falling can be utterly different.” During the desert circuit they kept encountering ancient fossils, modern mines, wandering herders, and wind‑farm turbines rising like a forest; these encounters always plunged her into imaginings of disparate times and spaces—like folding through space and time. For her, the emotional power lies less in locating a specific object than in the fieldwork and the encounters it produces; the necessity of bodily experience is precisely this. Among the debris in the Gobi, a tiny mushroom called Agaricus subrutilescens caught her attention: “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, it would be hard to imagine—reality is that dramatic. Despite explosions and crowds, this dry, twig‑like mushroom quietly continued its life beside the wreckage.” The textures of nature’s folds can perhaps only be momentarily apprehended through such embodied perception.