Desert Garden (multimedia installation) & Groundless Flower (3D animation)

Transparent LED screens, glass and stainless steel sculptures, paintings, custom floor mat, 3D animation, 4K video with sound

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Music and sound editing by Frank Carlberg

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A giant, transparent flower sways continuously in an uncanny garden—an ever-shifting landscape where mirage-like forms flicker between presence and absence. Desert Garden immerses viewers in a world where the boundaries between the human and non-human, virtual and physical, dissolve. At its core, the luminous flower—rendered on a shimmering LED ice screen—hovers between organic life and digital apparition, surrounded by fragmented desert landscapes that oscillate between desolation and renewal. Yefeng’s practice navigates the instability of identity, place, and perception, shaped by his experiences of migration and cultural displacement. Born in Shanghai and now based between New York and Shanghai, he works across 3D animation, video installation, sculpture, and text, constructing speculative worlds that explore the tensions of belonging and estrangement. In Desert Garden, he draws on his journey to the Gobi Desert, translating its vast, liminal spaces into a poetic meditation on movement, transformation, and the paradoxes of nomadic existence. The work fuses digital and material elements, including 3D animation, sculptural interventions, and an immersive multimedia environment, blurring the line between simulation and sensation. The desert, often imagined as an empty expanse, becomes a charged space of adaptation, imagination, and shifting possibilities. The swaying flower, a recurring motif in Yefeng’s work, embodies fragility and persistence, existing in a state of perpetual motion yet tethered to an elusive ground. Blending playful aesthetics with conceptual depth, Desert Garden invites viewers into a speculative landscape where perception is fluid, and new worlds continuously unfold.

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Relevant readings: 

ArtBasel Hong Kong | Encounters 2025, curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor

ArtBasel Stories: This artist got lost in the Gobi desert - and made an installation about it

 

 

This project is generously supported by Shanghai Museum of Glass

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