At London’s Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop, Wandering Till the Wind Whispers My Land unfolds as a poetic investigation into wind, wandering, and the perennial search for belonging. Gathering eight Chinese diasporic artists working across continents, materials, and temporalities, the exhibition drifts between distance and return. From 19th September to 18th October, air grows heavy and wandering becomes intent. Here, wind is not simply weather—it is a way of sensing, a carrier of feeling, an epistemology of survival in a world shaped by movement.
Curator Daisy Di Wang centres the exhibition around “unbecoming” and the “threshold”. Instead of asking where home is, she asks how home can be unmade and redetermined in the atmospheres of global capitalism, border regimes and migrant bodies. Engaging with Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subjectivity and Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism, the show constructs a kind of layered system of winds: structural, bodily, urban and affective. Four chapters emerge as though climate change were underway: Structures in the Wind, Breathing Across Bodies, At the Threshold: Matter and Painting and Where Mist Hangs and Rain Pauses.
The first chapter, Structures in the Wind, centres drift in the machines of time and economy. Feng Mingyue’s An Hour (2024) and Flowing (2024) are churned by the logic of productivity. The printers roar, and the paper piles up like sediment from an invisible hurricane. Time becomes measurable and subject to trade; bodies are data in the weather system of capital. One can almost smell the red tape in the air. Feng makes the global system palpable; he lends the “winds of capitalism”a beat that pulses through the exhibition.
From the machines of power, the show heaves out into the second chapter: Breathing Across Bodies. Here the winds are intimate and fragile. Yao Qingmei’s Prelude to Love (2022-2023) charts the interruptions of a disciplined body. The performer’s breath seizes up and reenters. It is a politics of inhale and exhale. Her Blowing a Feather (2024) further softens ideology into a negotiation with gravity itself. While Li Yilei’s Three Breaths (2025) captures anonymous breaths on blank cassettes. It is an archive of unarchivable presence, a poignant documentation of some existences that resist being documented, but still deserve to be felt. Gao Chang’s multi-sensory installation Can You Feel My Diasporic Love? (2025) amplifies the touch of hands and the heartbeat of the performer into circuitry. Diasporic feeling becomes a kinetic force field. In this cluster, wind is not metaphor but substance: a shared atmosphere where bodies meet through vibration, vulnerability and desire.
If breath lifts, gravity falls back. At the Threshold: Matter and Painting, the third chapter of the exhibition, presents painting as land as sediment as interface. Li Gang’s Consanguinity (2023) is a practise that literally grinds soil into pigment, letting land tell lineage. The work is rich with memory: minerals, microbes, histories. Once severed from its geography, the earth is nomadic also. As sediment is, and as the artist herself has been.
Opposite, facing screens and surfaces and gaps unseen, Zhou Gongmo’s Filter (2025) reflects the seeing and being seen. Light enters like a two-dimensional breeze. The reflective surface also captures the viewer’s own reflection, reminding us that seeing today is edited, filtered and like wind, impossible to grasp. Light or screen in one, motion in the other, they stage time’s duality: sediment and motion.
The final chapter, Where Mist Hangs and Rain Pauses, brings wind back into urban climate and everyday humidity. In Fan Bangyu’s Lost Message series (2025), forgotten urban objects are archaeological strata. The manhole, the wallet, a stray bill or dropped receipt: all are soaked through with stories the city forgot to file. Water stains and fingerprints speak of unseen hands that have let go. Here, wind is courier and carrier. It connects strangers who never meet. Closing the loop, Yang Qinlin’s Central Line (2022) and Baker Street Station (2023) are a series of prints, and the latest in the trilogy, Tottenham Court Road I (2025). Together, they capture London as a wet, archaeological mood. Fog acts as a palliative, blurring order and diminishing power. For the newcomer, the city is breathable but impossible to read. Sight wavers but presence is here.
What makes this exhibition particularly compelling is that it resists the familiar tropes of diasporic identity. There are no staged ethnic spectacles, no archetypal carriers of culture. Instead, the curatorial voice is brisk but sharp. It is wind itself: always moving, never still. Text is not fixed in relation to the work. It moves with it. Meaning flows.
The exhibition seizes diasporic experience from the level of “cultural symbols” and converts it into the movements of the body, the climate of matter and urbanness. It is an intelligent and affectionate way of doing things. From systems to bodies, from the city back to emotion and air itself, the curatorial narrative is wide in vision but granular in its attention. Whether it is soil and migration, printers and the clock of capital, heartbeats and circuitry, or fog and the estranged cityscape, the works bear their meanings, not in textual labels. Ultimately, the exhibition suggests that belonging must be understood not as a fixed identity, but as an ongoing process shaped by mobility, material relations and atmospheric encounters.
All photos courtesy of BeingSync and Bryan Cheung except where indicated
