Wang Yu-Song

王煜松 

Light belongs to the surface, yet it also enters the underground. It mediates between time and space, allowing history to become memory, and memory to become the substance of dreams.

Endless takes its title from the historical Wuji Cableway in Jinguashi. Derived from the English word Endless, it originally referred to the continuously circulating cable system that transported ore through the mountain. To me, it also describes a movement that never truly begins or ends—a circulation of landscape, memory, and time.

The work was installed on the lawn in front of the Prince's Guest House, where the mining office once stood. During the excavation, fragments of concrete, bricks, and ceramic tiles slowly emerged from beneath the ground. Digging the foundation of the work often felt like mining and archaeology at the same time. Every layer of earth revealed another layer of the landscape.

A local elder returned to the site with me. Standing on the empty lawn, he pointed toward the ground, describing the corridors, the toilets, and the building that had disappeared decades ago. Through his words, an invisible architecture gradually appeared. The landscape I was standing on became inhabited by another time.

At the center of the work is a mirrored underground passage. Looking through the opening, the viewer does not see darkness, but the sky reflected from the opposite end of the tunnel. Like a periscope, the passage connects two distant spaces, making the underground appear to open toward another world.

I have never believed that the underground is empty.

When ore is removed, what remains is not simply a void. It is filled with light, darkness, echoes, moisture, air, pressure, memory, and time. Excavation does not reveal the past; it reveals that the past has never completely disappeared.

The earth removed from the excavation was shaped into a sphere and placed beside the opening. The sphere and the hole describe the same body in two different states. The hole is the three-dimensional shadow of the sphere. One exists above the ground; the other beneath it. One is matter; the other is space.

By removing a part of the earth, the underground becomes the sky. The inside becomes the outside. What appears empty becomes another form of existence. The passage becomes a ventilation shaft through which different spaces, different times, and different memories continue to breathe together.