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| Poems in the Mount Lu Zoo (2015-20) | Flaunting Peacock, video still | The Becoming of Feathered Beings, video still | King of Monkey Hill, video still | Clouded Leopard in the Clouds, video still | Who Killed the Deer, video still | Protective Infanticide, video still | Protective Infanticide, video still | Protective Infanticide, video still |
| Ten-channel HD video installation | ||||||||
| Meditations in an Emergency. 11/05/20-30/08/20. UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing | ||||||||
| Motion is Action – 35 Years of Chinese Media Art. 22/09/23-23/02/24. By Art Matters Museum, Hangzhou | ||||||||
| Thresholds, Flaneur and Whirlpools. 27/12/24-30/03/25. Wind H Art Center, Beijing | ||||||||
| Yi Xin Tong’s interest in non-human beings and site-specificity renews in his latest work Poems in the Mount Lu Zoo. The series of ten poetry videos revolves around the history of decline and transformation of a zoo in his hometown Mount Lu. The zoo was built in 1953, but in the 1990s, fell into disrepair and was ultimately abandoned. Later, pavilions originally designed to fit the characteristics of different animals were gradually occupied by workers from elsewhere, transformed into residential dwellings. Since 2015, Tong has visited the zoo every year and recorded its changing conditions, observing how the architecture have been devoured by nature or altered by humans according to their needs. The ten videos concern individual species and pavilions. The narratives render an allegorical texture, while the moving images can also be regarded as footnotes to the poems. The artist embeds the videos in an arc-shaped wall he designed for the exhibition at UCCA, inspired by the architectural elements of the zoo as well as the "windows" carved out by its later occupants. The provocative relationship between animals, humans, and architecture in this spatiotemporal context has its ups and downs as if in a three-act drama. |
| – Curator Neil Zhang | |
| A text and image form of the work exists on Critical Times, a peer reviewed journal published by Duke University Press – “On the Mountain of the Hermits: ‘The Becoming of Feathered Beings’,” curated by art historian Winnie Wong. | |
| This project is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. | |