In Echoes Off Embers
ABOUT
Overview
In the summer of 2024, three fellows conducted ethnographic research in Cangyuan County, Yunnan Province, China, focusing primarily on the transformations of village life and the cultural tourism industry under modernization. We drew on original, multimedia arts—photography, poetry, and music—to attempt to represent what we saw and thought. It grew into In Echoes Off Embers, an audiovisual art project derived from anthropological praxis.
Sojourning across several villages as outsiders, we encountered complex situations and people with complex life stories; we experienced sacred rituals, trivial dialogues, and unexpected commonalities. There was discomfort and confusion but also sincerity and empathy. Countless details profoundly touched us, evoking subtle sentiments, continuous rumination and discussion, as well as the possibility of defamiliarizing ourselves through the “other.” These are the ultimate gifts that field research offers.
Perspective
Through a first-person lens mapping multi-sensory, localized experiences and reinterpreting our participant observation, we seek to build a three-dimensional context that conveys our “voice” in Cangyuan.
This voice is fundamentally personal: from the immediacy of the encounter to the ripples of memory, an artist’s individual voice expresses an authentic experience of becoming immersed in an unfamiliar territory. At the same time, this voice is shared: by integrating artworks rooted in kindred local experiences, we hope to leverage the resonance of multiple creators to construct an “echo of collective memory.”
Retrospect
Flashback to the autumn of 2024. From posting a WeChat Official Account to building our own independent website, we began to see the vast potential of pushing the project further. Through continuous intellectual iterations, staying in contact with the locals, and eventually returning to Cangyuan, we transitioned our online exhibition into real space.
In March 2025, the In Echoes Off Embers project team, in collaboration with the arts organization Artrium, held a weeklong exhibition and intellectual salons at Libertango Bar in Beiluoguxiang, Beijing. Engaging in dialogues with visitors offered the three artists new insights into audiovisual art’s spatial dynamics and expressive efficacy. In August 2025, we restaged our exhibition at Inter Art Gallery in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, with the curation reframed and the content refined.
Expectation
Photography, poetry, and music come together as three artistic languages, grounding the creators' personal voices and shared encounters. By transmuting first-person experiences into interpretable symbols within a physical space, In Echoes Off Embers represents not only a reflux of the creators' own affectus, but also an invitation extended to a wider audience: emancipate your senses and inquire inward. We hope to bridge the remote and the contiguous, awaken urban dwellers to reconsider alternative ways of living and spectrums of meaning, and spark critical reflections on our own existence.
「Guide」
——how to get to Cangyuan and find yourself
“In Echoes Off Embers” projects this field journey through photography, poetry, and chamber music. The narrative unfolds across seven chapters, seamlessly integrating three forms of artistic creation in terms of both timing and content. Readers are instructed to start by playing the recording of the chamber music piece and then proceed to browse through the content in the order of the titles once the recording begins. The narratives and emotions conveyed through each musical segments can be synchronously connected to the poetry, with time stamps preceding each poem corresponding to the audio timeline. The scenes and narratives depicted in the photography share similar memories and experiences with the music and poetry, enabling readers to dive into the “flow” of Cangyuan through the photographic works. Through a visual and auditory artistic language constructed by the three genre of art materials, we attempt to communicate the intricate emotions derived from the field work, exploring the boundaries of meaning.
