Whispers from Deep Time: Multispecies Flows Stirring at the Margins
Text / Hu Xinrong
Original by TANC, ART NEWS China (Chinese edition) 2023-07-13
At Shanghai’s July art scene—wrapped in social topics and affective sensibilities—visitors to Long Pan’s solo exhibition at the new timeline media art center (CAC) may experience a momentary disorientation. That unsettlement likely stems from the artist’s deliberate retreat of her “human” identity into a submerged, decentered awareness: familiar objects and utilitarian demands tied to the self, to humanity, and to living beings are displaced by unfamiliar forms and methods. In their place are traversals of places forgotten or eager to be forgotten—heavy‑metal contamination zones, landfills—landscapes that, despite being disregarded, often outlast most of the edifices celebrated elsewhere. These journeys through entangled temporalities yield ambiguous states perpetually poised for collapse, decomposition, and renewal in the next instant.
The exhibition’s title turns attention to becoming and indeterminacy—Long Pan’s solo project “Dust‑borne Flux” reveals the interpenetrating flows between animate and inanimate life through the movement of metals among technological objects, land, and plants, and exposes the contemporary alchemy behind it: chemical processes and capitalism’s geographically dispersed logistics.
Two works in Dust‑borne Flux—Thousand‑Leaf Assemblage and Fireworks—arise from Long Pan’s investigative series begun in 2020. Through research into China’s major e‑waste dismantling sites, she focused on Guiyu town in Guangdong Province, one of the world’s largest electronic‑waste processing centers. Since the 1990s, Guiyu has accepted overseas e‑waste, applying crude metallurgical techniques to extract metals, accompanied by massive releases of chemicals, heavy metals, and organic pollutants into the environment. Heavy metals that pervade the environment are mobile but hard to remove; despite nearly a decade of remediation, traces of past contamination still surface in Long Pan’s work—in satellite maps showing blanked areas, in old mounds of soil awaiting removal (or perhaps never to be removed), and in reed roots stained rust‑yellow.
In Thousand‑Leaf Assemblage, Long Pan uproots plant root systems from Guiyu and burns them into ash glazes, applying the material to leaf‑shaped porcelain tiles; the metal particles once entombed in plant tissue are transformed into visible color gradients, which under the microscope resolve back into glittering dust. Fireworks stage copper’s spectacular return to the earth after refining and liquefaction, reenacted through the traditional Chinese iron‑flower technique. Yet unlike the ephemeral sparks in the film, copper—once dispersed by humans—persists in nature across generations, a fact that must be considered on far larger temporal and spatial scales.
As Long Pan turns her attention outward and into the field—documenting, being present, and rendering legible the mineral narratives that enter human civilization via extraction, roam under global capital across planetary systems, and eventually return to nature—Cao Shuyi immerses herself in a denser world‑story woven from evidence, extrapolation, reportage, accidents, and contingency. Through flowing materials and texts, she tells of the movements of natural and technological things and the frozen instants that fix them, speaking from the scale of deep time.