Tossing Stones: Process as Practice · 投石：从田野、驻地到工作室，艺术生产中的过程作为实践

Participant in a group exhibition at Nature Art Centre, Shenzhen, on process as practice – recording the podcast for its Broadcast Station with fellow travellers from the Day & Night trip to Xundian – and speaker at the opening talk.

Tossing Stones – Process as Practice: Artistic Production Across Field, Residency, and Studio is a group exhibition curated by Chris Wan Feng at Nature Art Centre, Shenzhen. It places its focus on the process of artistic production, bringing together ten practitioners across different fields: Chen Xiaoyi, Damien Zhang, Nie Xiaoyi, You Yiyi, Lin Yulong, Justin Hui, Sun Yan, Shawn Tang, Rui Lanxin and Fan Haoran.

Rather than emphasising finished works, the exhibition turns to the “unfinished state” – the open-ended potential of the creative process – presenting completed artworks and studio experiments alongside the working notes and in-progress archives of curators and researchers. A continuously updated “Broadcast Station” offers a rotating platform for participants to reflect on processes of artistic production.

The stone runs through the exhibition as its central image: it stands for the participants’ exploration of the material world, and echoes the saying “tossing a stone to find the way” – taking action to pose questions, and waiting for echoes and ripples.

Most of the participants had travelled together in the winter of 2024 to Xundian, Yunnan, for Day & Night – a self-organised, self-funded week of “roaming by day, talking by night”. That trip became the shared ground of the exhibition. At its centre stood the Broadcast Station (2025), where some of the travellers looked back on the journey in the form of a podcast; visitors could listen and piece together what the trip had been. I took part in recording the podcast – Episode 01, on Day & Night in Xundian.

*Broadcast Station, 2025. Installation view, Tossing Stones, Nature Art Centre, Shenzhen. Courtesy of Nature Art Centre*

Opening talk

6 July 2025, 4–5pm, with Lin Yulong, Fan Haoran, Damien Zhang, Nie Xiaoyi and Chris Wan Feng.

*From left: Damien Zhang, Nie Xiaoyi, Lin Yulong, Fan Haoran, Chris Wan Feng*

（大家在一起时）似乎是天作之合般的那样一个状态。它能够再复制出来吗？就好像你突然做了一桌菜，下次那个味道可以再出来吗？我觉得这是很难去讲的。但是我感觉好像是第一次尝到那种味道之后，你记住了它，然后你下一次知道什么是对的状态，也会有去接近它的动力、愿望以及体感。（《投石》）不是具有行业性目标、要对外向公众负责的项目，但它对内给了一种空间，让大家去认识彼此对艺术的执着和方式。很多时候，做艺术的人会有很多对自我的敏感认知，但在这里面能够感受到，通过上一次的旅行之后，在这里有一个很安全的、很信任的状态。

— Nie Xiaoyi at the opening talk (opening recap, Nature Art Centre)

Review: Sun Jialing, “‘投石’：一场展览如何将‘误差’作为方法”, Art-Ba-Ba, 3 September 2025.