d r i f t : Movement, Metamorphosis, and Memory

During our residency at Nieuw en Meer in Amsterdam, we filmed a quiet sunrise over the lake, facing the Zuidas skyline. At first, it felt like a moment of serene stillness: the horizon gradually shifting, the water reflecting liquid light, soft and luminous.

Sunrise, Amsterdam Nieuw en Meer, 2025

Only later did we learn that, at the very same moment, the body of Luo Shengmen, a 23-year-old Chinese student, was found in the lake. The lake, like the sun itself, gives and takes; it is both generous and unknowable. In that duality, drift emerges in its many senses: the literal movement of water, the wandering of thought and memory, the emotional flux of presence and absence.

Drawing on Michael Taussig, who describes dawn as “liquid light… a creaturely substance” and the sun as a ritual force of continuous metamorphosis, we returned to the footage with a new perspective. The sunrise became more than imagery, it became a vanitas, memento mori, and a meditation on impermanence, uncertainty, and transformation.

d r i f t unfolds as a five-channel text-video, each screen containing one letter, spelling d r i f t . The footage is presented upside-down, topsy-turvy, with the horizon line cutting through the letters, destabilizing legibility and echoing the disorientation of the moment itself. Calm and beauty coexist with shadow and loss, producing a performative readability where human presence, natural forces, and circumstance converge.

Here, d r i f t is motion and stasis, giving and taking, life and loss, a reflection of how the sublime emerges from the continuous metamorphosis of the world, the lake, and the human experience within it.

d r i f t, 2025, 5-channel-HD-video-installation, color, no sound, 40:44 minutes