Water is central to life on Earth. It is in constant circulation within and without us, connecting past and present, something particularly visceral in Chengdu, birthed by an irrigation system created in 256BCE under the first emperor of China, to harness the spring melt-water coming off of the Tibetan plateau. Today it continues to serve some 668,700 hectares of farmland. Rivers flow through the city, giving a softness to this vast alluvial landscape.
The A4 museum is within the new Luxelakes Eco-City new town, an area filled with new construction. Building sites and cranes everywhere, we see machines constantly unearthing things from a time before humans, and generating new surfaces.
In this work a large plate glass rests on a layer of colored sand like an accumulated stratum. Weights suspended from small cranes drop onto it, creating cracks and fissures through which the colored sand rises to the surface, constantly generating new landscapes. The pulsing repetition of the cranes represent our continuous cycle of creation and destruction, humanity struggling to improve our lives. Surface cracks eventually connect on the surface like the flows of rivers, changing the possibilities we have to create and change the course of our own psychogeographies.