In her creative practice, Luan Xueyan uses fibers as a continuously proliferating spatial language, interweaving environments, bodies, and materials to delicately draw out the unspoken narratives of life. Serving as an extended exploration of Luan Xueyan: void with wind, we have invited artists Tan Yao and Xian Cao Nai Nai to MACA. Using stockings — a delicate material that acts as an intimate second skin—as their creative thread, participants will sculpt the memories, desires, and emotions of everyday life, allowing them to take on new physical forms within the fabric.

The creation could temporarily reside within the exhibition space, forming fresh dialogues with the works of Luan Xueyan and other participants. Or, they can transform into wearable body ornaments, a fringe, an amulet, a miniature textile sculpture, or an as-yet-unnamed existence that accompanies you as you leave the gallery, continuing to evolve in daily life.

These acts of wrapping, entangling, and connecting, collectively forged by different bodies will converge into an everexpanding communal fabric. It resembles a nervous system, the root network of a plant, a flowing river, or an endlessly unfolding map of memory.

The sacredness of the daily lies hidden within worn garments, tucked among loose threads, fibers, folds, and fraying edges. Every act of wrapping has the potential to become a subtle ritual. And it is possible that every winding of a thread is the gestation of a transient deity.

About the Instructor: Tan Yao

In her recent practice, Tan Yao focuses on the hidden yet enduring connections within everyday life: the intersections of body and memory, the individual and the family, reality and belief, as well as the ineffable bonds between humans and the world. Through fictional characters, rituals, and material translation, she constructs a narrative system situated between reality and legend. This approach allows mythology to serve as a method for responding to contemporary experiences, offering a dwelling place for unnamed sensations. In recent years, by interweaving text, imagery, materials, and actions, she has continuously constructed an open, ongoing site of "writing."

 

About the Instructor: Xian Cao Nai Nai

Wu Aijuan is an embroidery artist. Wu spent the first half of her life farming in the fields before relocating to Beijing with her family. In the brief intervals between helping care for children at home, she began her freeform embroidery practice. Using coarse cotton, old fabric scraps, and leftover cotton gauze from diapers—materials intimately connected to her daily life—she has crafted an entire poetic world where imagination and reality seamlessly intertwine.