Yun-Fei Ji

Yun-Fei Ji paints migration, displacement, and the ghosts that follow. His scrolls — ink and watercolor on paper, read right to left — are populated by spectral figures, animal spirits, and the ordinary people caught in the path of dams, floods, and infrastructure. The technique is classical Chinese; the subjects are urgently contemporary.

He grew up in rural China during the Cultural Revolution, absorbing ghost stories and folklore that now function as metaphor and critique. The Three Gorges Dam, Hurricane Katrina, involuntary relocations — each becomes a monumental narrative, suspended between tradition and modernity, humour and devastation.

The work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, and museums across three continents. But the centre remains fieldwork: going to the source, documenting wreckage, and preserving what progress destroys.