With the Times, Against their Shape

Augmented reality and sand sculpture, 2026, installation view: Technic Museum Stockholm "With the Times, Against their Shape" emerged as a dialogical approach along the Yangtze River in China, together with the artist Qing Lu. Along the river, a drawing practice developed in which current/flow was understood not merely as a natural phenomenon but as a figure of thought: the poetic breaking-open of national borders. The work followed concrete movements: the hands that traced the course of the Yangtze, the ink trace translated into digital volume, the analog gesture that takes shape again as a virtual sculpture. In this, the artist sought a pre-pictorial state that escapes the predetermined image logics of the software. In the interplay of Daoist ink drawing with approaches from Western painting and digital modeling, a relational space emerged, one that, in the sense of archipelagic thinking, can be understood as a structure of independent yet connected elements. The dialogue on the Yangtze thus became a process: forms do not arise from predetermined structures, but from encounter and difference in the context of two artistic positions with their respective collective memories.