hurry - wingwoman - hurry / worrying and wondering

Rammed earth poetry, June 2024

Xinan Helen Ran and Sarah Lammer, Stone Quarry Art Park, Syracuse, New York.

By hand tamping the local clay-rich topsoil, lime, and water inside giant letter foam molds, this new iteration of the “SoilSandSelfie” project bakes “pound cakes” that transform found text into rammed earth poetry as land art. The rammed text slowly disintegrated in the following months— by the rain, the wind and the creatures roaming around the land.

SoilSandSelfie Interview with SQAP Artistic Director Sayward Schoonmaker

This research-driven project draws the artist’s collection of wartime cartographic artifacts, transforming them into a layered environment of etchings, drawings, and signage. Silk Compass examines both the literal and metaphorical layers of maps, setting “then” and “now” into restless orbit and capturing the illusory permanence of tools and progress.

Beginning in late 1942, the United States and Great Britain produced more than 3.5 million acetate-rayon “silk” escape maps– quiet to unfold, double-sided, and resistant to salt and mildew– to help Allied troops evade capture. Closely related to spy-gadgets devised by the British intelligence unit MI9, these silk charts anchor Ran’s inquiry.

Maps were, and will never cease to be, attempts to completely experience reality. As physical charts yield to algorithmic ones, and personal data constructs new frontiers, maps harbor and extend fictions, biases– “paper towns”. How, then, do we safely escape and find our way home, my comrades?

Silk Compass at Essex Flowers

Press release >>

“A message. Between the portrait, which is my side, and the Memorial, which is the Other's, there is a message. The heads and tails of the message are linked…as I and the Other, each representing a side, keep turning the coin, we create with our own hands a fated cycle that we fall into.”

Group Lick at Tutu Gallery

Press Release >>

Mu Xin’s Windsor Cemetery Diary sets the tone: of an uncertain exchange between two strangers who never meet, speaking only through the flipping of a penny in an otherwise deserted graveyard.

In Xinan Ran’s second solo exhibition with Tutu Gallery, the artist continues this dialogue—this turning—by acknowledging the syndicated gestures that tire out rigid infrastructure.

This new body of work is conceived from and derivative of the phenomenon lachryphagy: butterflies who sip crocodile tears; animals that seek salt and minerals scarce in the wild. 3 pieces of stained white residue thread through artworks and the gallery space itself. They were once 50-pound blocks of salt, licked down by over 70 ewes and lambs on a sheep farm in rural New Hampshire. A vintage salt statue of a girl and a dog sits on the mantel. Based on the early 20th-century motif Can’t You Talk, it captures the girl’s innocent attempt to talk to her non-human companion. The dog’s legs, worn down by decades of contact, now hang by delicate threads of salt.

Conceived site-specific to the home of Tutu and April as a continuation of Xinan’s last project Future Trash, everyday items including floor cushions, shower curtains, hang tags, markers, and fragrances are paired with text through embroidery, heat transfer, gluing, drawing, and writing.

The exhibition is installed around the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom, posting as a scavenger hunt backdropped by the accumulation of private life.

Very Sweet at Tutu Gallery

Press Release >>

TLC series

Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) on paper, marker, pencil. Series of 20+ individual drawings on paper. 3” wide, variable length.

Playing with the uncertainty of a scientific method, this combination of color and text depicts the theme of intimate joy.

Inquire to see more pieces in this series

A Mobile Home is a mobile installation resembling an emergency shelter tent, serving as both a public sculpture and an immersive performance stage. It visualizes the complex immigration process and offers a literal and metaphorical entry point for the public to understand, and contribute to, addressing the urban migrant crisis.

• A Mobile Home Project page

• Impulse Magazine: Migration in Dialogue – Xenoduo

The structure’s flexible, customizable design symbolizes the hurdles and phases of immigration bureaucracy, highlighting the adaptability that migrants employ to swiftly establish a “home” using unfamiliar or makeshift resources. The installation employs materials commonly used for temporary constructions and features enlarged images of security screening questions from Temporary Protected Status (TPS) applications, covering both the interior walls and the exterior soft cover. With “layers” of interpretation for the public, A Mobile Home mirrors the intricacies of homemaking in a foreign land.

A Mobile Home was a 2024 More Art Engaging Artists Commission, co-created with Miguel Alejandro Castillo as Xenoduo.

Installed September 8–October 31, on the front lawn of the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, MA, Where We Belong: Tree Chuangs was commissioned by the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Three site-specific textile sculptures were created in collaboration with local communities and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. Sixty-six people ages 14–80 contributed through hands-on workshops offered by the HMSC Museum Education department. 

Photo credit: EJSP Visual | Julieta Sarmiento, courtesy Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

Installed in September behind the Sunset Park Rec Center in Brooklyn, NY. Two Chuangs were created in partnerships with four south Brooklyn organizations: Apex For Youth, Mixteca, Voces Ciudadanas, and Artyard Brooklyn. The project was supported by 2023 Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant.

Tree Chuang is a series of 6 site-specific textile sculptures that create multifaceted sensorial experiences throughout the grounds of Governor’s Island. Using the form of a traditional Chinese chuang—a cylindrical textile ritual apparatus commonly used in Buddhism—as a launching point, the works are both created collaboratively and showcase the unique personal narratives of NYC youths. Able to be viewed by the audience from both the outside and the inside, each structure serves as a metaphor for the duality of internal psychic space and external social space that we simultaneously inhabit as we navigate the world.  

This project is generously supported by Beam Center as a part of the Beam Camp City 2022. The organization brings together youth, artists, engineers, and educators to produce ambitious, collaborative projects.

More about the Tree Chuang project >>

Photos by Stefany Lazar

7000SEEDS digs into the shared illogical paranoia of the invasive other, and unearths the seemingly scientific cause-and-effects that we take as truth–out of anxiety and the fantasy for self-sufficiency–in a global market that is tumbling towards a slow ecological collapse.

The title 7000SEEDS is inspired by the 2001 manga series 7SEEDS by Yumi Tamura, which follows the struggle of five groups of young adults after their revival from cryonic chambers called “seeds.” The “seeds” in 7000SEEDS act both as invasive species and as intrusive thoughts–they are collected, purchased, preserved, and eventually–literally and metaphorically–planted, into a tangled fantasy of doomsday survival and destruction.

7000SEEDS at Essex Flowers

Press release >>

The project explores the politically different, yet similar cultural habits that China and the US share under the influence of late-stage capitalism. Through handmade, speculative products inspired by novelty gadgets, or “Unitaskers,” I examines the heightened prevalence of the contemporary wellness market.

The project “Future Trash” encompasses soft sculptures, printed materials, installation and performance in collaboration with Miguel Alejandro Castillo. 

15 minutes.

Listen to it wherever you are.

This is a 5 minute clip of a 15 minute piece.

One Train, 2019. 6mins

Production: Superstation Experimental TV Studios