Undercurrent
2025.11.11-2026.02.01
Artist： ZHENG JIANG
curtor：OFELIA CUI
The word “undercurrent” refers both to the reverse flow beneath the surface of a river and to the silent pulse beneath the appearances of everyday life. It is also a literary metaphor which often used to describe the hidden tensions and rifts within social conflicts or human relationships. In this project, artist Zheng Jiang adopts Undercurrent as the title, inspired by the bodily sensations evoked by the tunnel space and their resonance with his lived experiences in his hometown.
Three years ago, Zheng returned to his hometown in Jinyun County, Zhejiang Province, a hilly town surrounded by ridges. In a stone cave within a valley known locally as Shixia (Understone), he carved a single character—“愛” (love)—into the rock wall, in the form of a cliff inscription. He then made an ink rubbing on Xuan paper to preserve the character’s impression. The valley, shaped through both human quarrying and years of natural weathering, is what locals call Yandang, meaning a rock hollow formed by excavation. Today, the hollow serves as a natural reservoir: during the rainy seasons, it fills with water seeping from the mountain; during the dry seasons, the water is pumped out to irrigate the surrounding farmlands. The carved character “愛” acts as a primitive water gauge, linking climate change and agricultural life in the simplest way, silently narrating the town’s prosperity and decline, as well as the mountain’s destiny. For Zheng, this act is both a commemoration of his own upbringing and a preservation of his ancestors’ labor—transforming invisible natural rhythms and human emotions into a tangible imprint. In this exhibition, Love becomes the fulcrum that sets Undercurrent in motion. Long-suppressed desires and silenced emotions are brought to the surface, gleaming defiantly in the light. The work refuses to become a memorial inscription, nor does it seek to be a distant echo of the Baiheliang or the Nilometer.
Suspended around the tunnel slopes are a cluster of beehives, functioning as unique vessels for images. This medium stems from Zheng’s father’s hobby of beekeeping, an interest that once profoundly shaped his father’s personality and the family’s internal dynamics. Inside each beehive lies one of ten videos from Zheng’s series Ripples, like heartbeats sealed within wooden boxes. The round apertures through which viewers gaze serve as physical masks designed by the artist. Here, the artist invites viewers to momentarily set aside grand social narratives and instead begin by listening and looking: to the flock of sheep wandering before the screen; to the mist that forms from the temperature contrast inside and outside the cave; to the bees buzzing or struggling toward the light. He asks us to sense the “undercurrent” running beneath small-town life; to watch the man who endlessly pushes stones inside the grotto: how, when he pauses, he sits by the pool, staring blankly at the rippling surface. To wonder whether the fortune-teller’s “foretold life” manifests the Barnum effect for the one being foretold. Zheng seals the bittersweet pains of society, the working class, family, and the individual alike within these hives, pouring them into this ready-made “riverbed.”
At the end of the tunnel, gravel is laid out to resemble a shallow “river valley.” Upon this screen of transported stones and sand lies the final video of Ripples. The imagery contains no crashing waves but only the faint shimmer of rippling water, whose reflections dancing on the scarred rock walls once carved by human hands.
“Every mountain range is a remarkable monument to the Earth’s cataclysms.” When we gaze back upon the planet’s past and trace the stories of our own origins, our emotion is not only guilt for what we have done to nature, but also a profound reverence toward it. Civilization grows upon the wounds of ecology, and over time, it also mends those scars, as the eternal geological cycle of erosion and uplift, layer upon layer of renewal. Undercurrent should not merely signify danger, for danger is only the negative of stability. Deep beneath where sight cannot reach, undercurrents are forming, silent, invisible, yet forcefully persistent. They surge in the depths, sculpting character and shaping decisions, and may, at any sudden moment, alter the course of destiny. That is not the metaphor of the undercurrent but the undercurrent itself. Undercurrent is the undertone of life: the hidden connections beneath calmness, the symbiosis between nature and the individual, the circulation of ecosystems, and the gentle attrition that unfolds day by day.