Under the Roof: Mián
by Hu Lingyuan
A new moment arrives, and a subtle change occurs in how we sense and understand emotion. The New Year is often framed in this way; when it is experienced, it becomes a point at which the question of home is raised again. Home may refer to a house, to land, and life itself, yet it also exists as a place of continual departure and return.
Being in another city, at the intersection of time and place, I walked under a high roof, avoiding the soft drizzle. This brief passage opens a temporary shelter, where a certain relation starts to take shape from a vague sense, quietly echoing with the narration and structure of “home” embedded in Yu Qian’s materials. Time passes indoors, and thought turns back toward the self: what, then, else exists beneath the roof?
In Yu’s fiber installations, copper wire and patterned fabric constitute the main materials. At first glance, these materials do not appear remarkable, except for the checkered fabric, which carries a subtle sense of temporal dislocation. Their origins and processes would remain largely hidden without the artist’s account: copper wire stripped from an ancestral house by Yu’s grandfather, handled through repetitive, almost mechanical operations; patterned fabric woven by her grandmother for the marriage of the next generation of women, gradually taking form without predefined patterns. The differences between these materials are not erased, but remain in a shifting equilibrium through their mutual configuration.
Repetitive weaving makes the patterned fabric like a layer of skin, winding around the copper wire that supports it from within. In stillness, its original conductive quality transforms into a relational response in which different traces of labor interact. Emotion and energy reappear, suggesting a near-silent contract. The bloodline, within this experience, continues to flow, intertwining work, time, and memory.
“Giving” is no longer limited to a single subject but becomes an ongoing act that occurs across different individuals and spaces. A home-based prototype, a sheltering space in constant flux and transformation, gradually unfolds, allowing body, emotion, experience, and time to settle.
The form of Mián (“宀”) is drawn from the character home (家), and occupies the center of vision. It points to the earliest image of the house, while also turning inward in its semantic shift, like a roof placed within the body. When the character Mián is spoken, its homophonic relation to cotton creates a resonance at the level of language with Yu’s fiber materials. The woven fabric retains traces of hand movement and body temperature, and within its layered wrapping, the distance between grand narratives and lived experience begins to change. Vivid color offers an entry point into concealed labor and bodily context. Presence becomes perceptible, even if it does not always align with the everyday experience.
In the fiber work Tenderness (2025), a surging energy appears to lie beneath the surface, shaped through the intervention of the next generation and the undulating forms emerging from the interweaving of copper wires and patterned fabric. The initial thinking comes into focus within a wandering gaze, as if following the bodily inner path or a spine, exploring the sustained state of presence. Suspended between a diptych, the work forms a fan-shaped interstitial space, where linear, vein-like language intertwines like vines, transforming into a new configuration. What was once understood as an internal experience of labor disperses gradually, and its surrounding context changes as boundaries and positions diverge.
If copper wire and patterned fabric in Yu’s practice suggest a discernible tension, loofah fiber--an open, mesh-like material often found in domestic labor, rough yet malleable, light yet resilient--introduces an intermediate presence between them. Neither serving as a supporting function nor acting as an external wrapping, it operates more as a buffering role, through which the relation between the two materials is extended and mediated.
When the loofah fibers are stitched together with patterned fabric, a rupture opens within continuity, through which familiar perception is reconfigured. The gaze pauses at the sharply cut edge, where time seems to fall into suspension, in a state that opposes being fully described as nature. A slight stinging arises, prompting reflection on whether the hollow structure derives from intentional design or whether it is produced through the interaction between materials and structure. It appears as an ambiguous zone that activates different layers of experience. Gaze moves through moments of unanchored vision and displacement, shifting from one point to another, enabling those labor that sustain systemic operations yet stay unacknowledged to be briefly perceived.
Perhaps it is because the materials stem from familial relations and structures of mutual support that Yu’s practice still keeps a certain temperature, gently opening a space through ongoing transformation and interaction. On the canvas, dense colors gather, spread, and grow into irregular, clustered formations; lines extend and traverse within them, setting into motion a field of force and the unfolding of boundaries. These mutual enclosing formations recall how fiber materials, in a structure negotiated between interior and exterior, co-construct one another.
Fibers are stitched onto canvas with linear forms, echoing the wandering movement of brushstrokes, while also delicately pointing toward the channel-like structures of the bodily system. Softness remains tangible and perceptible, yet beneath the surface, a piercing visual quality is glimpsed intermittently, gradually taking form as distance increases.
Color saturates the structured space, bringing a sense of movement, while a progressive order develops within a chromatic base of red, yellow, and blue. It envelops several semi-open zones defined by suspended partitions (composed of linen and patterned fabric). Along paths of bending, segmentation, and connection, perception may find its grounding. Instead of serving as fixed objects, the works seem to extend into an implicit “fiber line,” along which the body moves through moments of return and redirection.
The spatial structure of the character Mián also unfolds from within the configuration, and gestures toward shelter and rest. Within this open structure, life enters as a continuous flow.
Hu Lingyuan (b. 1992) is an independent curator and art writer. She previously lived in Queens, New York, and is now based in Wuhan, Hubei.
Yu Qian (b. 1986, Zhoukou, Henan) is based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. She graduated from Xi’an University of Engineering in 2008 with a major in Fashion Design. Working primarily with painting and fiber-based installations, her practice centers on what she describes as the “fluidity of the essence of life.”Her work traces the subtle interplay between two modes of giving—labor and tenderness—examining how they intertwine to shape forms of familial inheritance. Through material and process, she reflects on how gestures embedded in everyday life accumulate into systems of memory, care, and continuity. In recent years, Yu’s work has been exhibited at the Hetao Parabell Venue of the 10th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Shenzhen), and Temporary Eternity: The 6th Shenzhen Contemporary Art Biennale at the International Convention and Exhibition Center.