In Xiao Deng’s latest work, Wujincang – Qi Series: Water, the viewer is not confronted with a depiction or metaphor of water, but with a materialized simulation of fluidity’s very ontology — a perceptual projection of movement itself. Rather than constructing a figurative or narrative world, Deng translates abstract notions, particularly the immeasurable qualities of time and spatial perception, into a sensory architecture that can be physically inhabited. When the viewer bends toward the liquid-metallic curvature of the piece, the physical world begins to collapse: the body’s reflection is stretched into blurred streaks of light, the gallery dissolves into layers of recursive reflection, and the “inexhaustible treasury” once evoked by Su Shi’s wind and moonlight becomes a tangible void-field.
From the mirrored dome of BDO to this 2025 installation, Deng has continued her investigation of the threshold where the virtual implodes into the real — an attempt to give sensory form to what resists linguistic or physical description: the primordial condition of the cosmos. In this new piece of artwork, the concave mirror becomes a vessel of negative space, bearing the tension of two entangled temporalities.
Her manipulation of non-linear time gives visual and spatial expression to the logic behind Su Shi’s paradox: “From the perspective of change, even Heaven and Earth last but an instant; but from the perspective of constancy, all things, ourselves included, are inexhaustible.” As French philosopher Gaston Bachelard describes in The Poetics of Space, enclosed cavities can evoke a deep state of contemplation in which the body and consciousness are no longer distinguished as subject and object, but rather enter into a shared sense of ‘intimate existence.’
The reflective surface of Wujincang – Qi Series: Water generates optical ambiguity. Boundaries are continuously erased and reconstituted; the subject and its surroundings enter a mutual distortion. Phenomenologically, this kind of reflection creates what Maurice Merleau-Ponty would call a “suspension of perception.” As he writes in The Visible and the Invisible, seeing is not a unilateral act, but a loop in which “I am seen by the world.” When ambient light spirals into the concave mirror and recognition gives way to retinal confusion, the viewer’s sensory thresholds heighten: breath slows in synchronicity with the mirrored field’s rhythm, faint external sounds surface in the auditory field, and the physical boundary between self and environment begins to dissolve into a Daoist field of resonance — where radiance merges with dust, and separation ceases to matter.
This installation extends Deng’s ongoing exploration of supra-sensory energy structures: dark matter, unrecorded vibrations, spatial collapse, and non-linear temporality. Such transcendental states, induced by sensory deprivation and perceptual interference, are aligned with her earlier public work for the Winter Olympics. Both projects reconstruct collective energetic fields through technological mediation, updating Su Shi’s notion of the “inexhaustible reservoir” into a posthuman, cybernetic context.
Deng excels at rendering invisible orders of the cosmos into tangible forms. As viewers’ reflections overlap and fuse into a shared totemic image, individual consciousness merges with a collective unconscious — fluid, ungraspable, and unpossessable. The installation suspends the viewer’s agency, displacing attention from a subjective origin into a liminal perceptual state. While such strategies may recall the spatial poetics of Anish Kapoor or Antony Gormley, Deng avoids religious mysticism or symbolic transcendence. Instead, she poses a purer epistemological inquiry: If form retreats, does perception remain?
There are no oracles in this work — only Qi, the ceaseless force we share with the ancient wind. By piercing the limitations of three-dimensional perception, Deng proposes a particle-physics reading of the Daoist notion of emptiness. Emptiness, here, is not absence but potential — a quantum fluctuation field from which all things may emerge. Just as Su Shi realized on his night journey along the Red Cliff, eternity is not elsewhere. It is right there, held in the moonlight atop a river.
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