Now open across the water reed wetlands of Dongting Lake in Hunan Province, the Third Dongting Lake International Reed Art Festival unfolds within a landscape shaped by cycles of emergence and submersion. Curated and directed by Tang Xinyu, with joint curation by Wang Feng, Director of Yueyang City Art Museum, the festival brings together 15 large-scale, site-specific works by artists from China, the UK, Japan and Korea. Many of the installations rise directly from the reeds themselves, while others hover above them, responding to a terrain that is as unstable as it is storied. The festival runs only until the water rises again, expected to close in early February, allowing the environment to determine its own duration.
Among the works most finely attuned to this shifting landscape is Floating Soil by SSG Collective. Returning to Dongting Lake after the success of their monumental Playground of Building Blocks in 2023, the collective takes a quieter, more contemplative turn. Floating Soil lifts a square fragment of wetland — a reed garden complete with stems and the memory of roots — and suspends it 13 metres above the marshes. What appears grounded is gently displaced: soil raised into air, weight held in balance.
The work floats with an almost uncanny calm. Reed stems sway softly in the breeze, while mirrored surfaces beneath reflect water, sky and surrounding vegetation, folding the landscape back onto itself. The effect is subtle but disorienting. Viewers are left to wonder whether this lifted fragment still belongs to the lake, or whether it has crossed into something else — a poetic, foreign land formed through slight removal rather than rupture.
SSG Collective describe the piece as a reflection on ecology and acquisition: what happens when land is lifted, separated, and re-framed? Yet the work resists didacticism. Instead, it operates through atmosphere and perception. As light shifts and wind passes through the reeds, Floating Soil continually redraws itself, inviting a slower mode of looking — one attuned to distance, suspension, and the fragile tension between reality and imagination.
Formed by Ren Junchao, Yang Zhaobo, and Patrick Jones, all graduates of the Royal College of Art, SSG Collective are known for translating ecological and social themes into immersive public sculptures that engage directly with their surroundings. Here, that sensibility feels precisely calibrated to Dongting Lake itself: a place where land is provisional, and presence is always temporary.
The setting amplifies the work’s resonance. Junshan Island, where the festival takes place, is submerged for much of the year, emerging only briefly before being reclaimed by water. Rich in cultural history and long celebrated in poetry, it is also home to the Dragon Boat tradition and an important migratory site for rare birds. Art here is never permanent; it exists in conversation with time, weather and return.
In this context, Floating Soil reads less as an object than as a gesture — a lifted breath of landscape held momentarily in suspension. As the water rises and the festival dissolves back into the lake, the work leaves no trace behind. What remains instead is a heightened awareness of how delicately the natural and imagined worlds intersect — and how easily the ground beneath us can shift.
