In May 2026, I was selected as an artist-in-resident for the Coastal Co-Art UK-China Residency on Chongming Island. My practice unfolded through an organic cycle of field research, site-specific writing, and bio-material synthesis. Moving between the island’s shifting mudflats and the inland heron woods, I engaged with the landscape not as a static setting, but as an active, non-human co-author. My time on the island yielded two cross-disciplinary works: Wing-woven Nexus, an eco-visual poem, and Unplace a Boot, a site-specific somatic performance.
watch this video of me explaining the piece and talking about the process
In Wing-woven Nexus, the poetic page is reimagined as a responsive ecological skin. Developed on Chongming Island, the eco-visual poem collapses the boundary between the textual page and the wetland body. The translucent, organic substrate is crafted from bioplastics embedded with found objects gathered from the island's heron woods—feathers, shattered eggshells, snail shells, and shrimp detritus that the herons likely carried from the shoreline. Rather than sitting flatly on a surface, the poetic line wanders along the undulating, puckered topology of this organic membrane. The visual rhythm of the poem mirrors the somatic pulse of the piece: the profound ecological enmeshment of the island’s avian life.
Tracing the contours of the material, the text ripples outward—‘cadenced by the pulses of light-exalted tides,’ which breathes life into the very name of Chongming (崇明), echoing its ancestral definition as a landscape that admires and exalts light. As the text dips into the lower ridges of the membrane, it unearths a deeper tether, observing ‘your airiness carries the metabolic weight of the island.’ Here, the heron is illuminated not merely as a bird in flight, but as an ecological nexus. The bird’s hollow-boned "airiness" is intimately tied to the heavy, churning cycles of the mudflats; by feeding, nesting, and moving between the woods and the intertidal zone, the herons weave a metabolic link that cycles nutrients and energy, physically carrying the life-weight of Chongming Island.
Medium: eco-visual poem
Mixed materials: text, bioplastic, Chinese yam, feathers, shattered heron eggshells, snail shells, and shrimp detritus, reed
Dimension: 25 x 37 cm 大小：25 x 37 cm
Reflection
Coastal Entanglement
We finished the residency on Tuesday but there's been so much to follow up and process that I literally did nothing today, simply letting it all sink in. As a writer, I relied mostly on my sensory apparatus to construct memories: the fragrance of orchids that greeted me on the first day, the mesmerising labyrinth crab burrows across the coast, the marvellous polyphony of herons and unfamiliar birds, the unrelenting heat of sun on my skin, the sweetness of edible 槐花, and so much more...
There are a lot of stories to be told but one experience continues to reverberate is when I got trapped in the quicksand-like mudflat. It happened in a flash—the mud gave way with such sudden velocity that my brain wasn't allowed time to register the danger. It was only later, the more I thought about it, that I fully grasped how treacherous it had been.
photo credit: Yolanda vom Hagen
Unplace a boot
Medium : site-specific performance
Edited film duration：05:32
Unplace a Boot is a performance that sprang from an unexpected, physical crisis within the intertidal landscape of Chongming Island. Conceived after the artist became trapped in the coastal silt—leaving a single rainboot entombed—the performance investigates the sudden, humbling shock of physical vulnerability and the limits of human posture. Rather than viewing the mud as a passive backdrop or a static place, the work encounters the shore as a living state of matter that actively responds to, and reshapes, the human body.
Collaborating with textile artist Wang Huan, who designed the garments and an installation directly upon the shifting silt, the performance charts a choreography of exhaustion, surrender, and ecological calibration. Moving along the path of reeds laid by Huan, the artist intensely attempts to dig into the mud—first utilising a stick, and later bare hands—before fully expending all energy against the resistance of the coast.
photo credit: Yolanda vom Hagen
As physical effort collapses into total surrender upon the silt, the cerebral understanding of entanglement dissolves, settling deep into the bone and dwarfing the human figure into a single, vulnerable node within the more-than-human world. At its core, Unplace a Boot is not an act of retrieval or a search for an object of belonging, but a ritual of making amends for what does not belong; it is a profound moment of unlearning human posture.
Reflection
Coastal Entanglement
It was a very sunny morning when we returned to the coast. In the car, she asked if I suffered PTSD from the earlier life-threatening struggle. Strangely, I did not. We had meticulously considered safety, but far more important was this: I didn't see the mudflat as a devouring monster or a sullen adversary. It was an interactive field that would teach me to adapt my humanness. I was ready to enter and learn.
photo credit: Yolanda vom Hagen