traverse is honored to present the new exhibition “Lost in Scales”, featuring the latest series of works by artist Chu Bingchao.

Preface

Sitting in the vast outskirts of Quyang in China’s Hebei Province, the isolated mountain named “Jianlong” (Seeing the Dragon) belongs to the small village Nanyangma. For a very long time villagers had been mining stones on the mountain, mainly producing quartz and granite. Each household had its own open pit. Stones were excavated and became part of their family houses, courtyard walls, roads, millstones, and troughs for livestock, with the rest being sold to the outlanders. It’s a village made out of stone, and Mount Jianlong “fed” the entire village.

The artist Chu Bingchao likes the phrase “those who live on a mountain live off the mountain”: the mountain feeds the people, and people “eat up” the mountain. A few years ago, the local administration banned all open-pit mining, after which the villagers gave up their mines, and left their hometown to find new jobs in the city. The constellation of open pits on Mount Jianlong were eventually all abandoned, like scars left by the flesh being chewed away from it.

A special kind of stone is found among the leftover stone blocks in the abandoned mines. The artist named it “the stone of the dragon scale”, which is actually a layer of mica sandwiched in the schist. Accidentally exposed during the previous mining process, the mica “scales” can be easily spotted with their silver metallic sheen. The artist collected all the dragon scale stones in one abandoned open pit and piled them up in the gallery space. Like scabs picked from its open wounds, it was the dragon he saw in the mountain.

No one ever traced the origin of “Jianlong”(Seeing the Dragon), a name passed down from generation to generation. In addition to the dragon, tales about a giant python and a golden toad had been well retold among the villagers. Even the stone had its own birthday. Tales exist wherever people exist. When people leave the mountain, there will always be new places to live on; but when the mountain leaves people, will we see the dragon again?

About Curator

Lixing (Ivy) Feng received her degree from Princeton University School of Architecture and currently works as both an architect and independent curator. As an architect, she worked for SOM in New York and Neri&Hu in Shanghai, focusing mainly on building renovation design and research. As an independent curator, she curated “#HASHTAG” on media art in 2017-2018, and “Hill of the Madman” on art and craft in 2022-2023, both held at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai.

About traverse

Established in 2023, traverse is a contemporary art space transformed from warehouse No.9 of the former Beijing Textile Factory, now called Langyuan Station. Traverse is dedicated to creating a shared research+practice platform for artists, scholars, designers, and builders, in which calm and sensitive minds are protected in a time of ever-accelerating replacement of old with new, and to seeking artistic and critical ways of intervention through exhibition, publication, design, and construction.

Address: Warehouse No.9, Langyuan Station, 53 Banjieta Village, Chaoyang District, Beijing.