Geology as Condition: Material Entanglement and the Weight of the Digital
by Luman Jiang, April 9, 2026
Installation view of Lithic Coordinates. Photo by Echo Xu. Courtesy of the artist and CHINCHIN Art.
Curated by Shuhan Zhang at Art Cake, Lithic Coordinates does not approach geology as a stable origin or a symbolic backdrop. Instead, it repositions the geological as an active condition, one that unfolds across material processes, perceptual structures, and technological systems. Stone, in this context, is neither inert nor fixed. It becomes a site through which pressure, memory, erosion, and inscription are continuously negotiated.
The strength of the exhibition lies not in treating geology as metaphor, but in constructing a perceptual field in which materiality itself becomes unstable. Boundaries between the organic and the infrastructural, the bodily and the mineral, are deliberately loosened. Surfaces bear traces of accumulation and loss, while processes such as sedimentation, crystallization, and dissolution function both as formal strategies and conceptual frameworks. Here, geology is no longer presented as an image to be viewed, but as a condition of entanglement to be experienced: atmosphere thickens into archive, and digital systems reveal their deep embeddedness in material extraction and planetary residue. As Jussi Parikka suggests in A Geology of Media, media have never been separate from the geophysical conditions that sustain them.
Within this structure, the participating artists do not present discrete positions but operate within a shared logic of material transformation. Zhanyi Chen’s Cloudbusting (Rain Poems) mobilizes precipitation as an inscriptive force, allowing rainwater to register itself through processes of transfer and erosion. Longing appears here not as an expression but as a residue, something that accumulates without resolution. Huanzhe Hu’s Drifting Records extends geological thinking into sound, transforming ice and concrete into resonant instruments. Landscape is no longer treated as an object to be represented, but as an event that unfolds through vibration, memory, and temporal decay.
Installation view of Lithic Coordinates. Photo by Echo Xu. Courtesy of the artist and CHINCHIN Art.
Kun Juliet Wang’s Riverbed collapses distinctions between flesh and mineral, presenting a body that is at once organic and geological, subject to erosion, regeneration, and continuous reformation. Chuanduan Chen’s photographic and AI-generated works, Arrow of Time, Fleeing Dark Matter, and meteorite, translate natural forms into psychic strata, where mourning accumulates like sediment. His use of generative AI is particularly incisive. The algorithmic image, often framed as immaterial, is redirected toward geological processes, exposing a recursive loop between the earth that enables computation and the earth that computation reconfigures.
Yinghan Zhang’s Heart of Stone and Hug, produced through full-shape stone rubbings and silver leaf, compress the temporality of scholars’ stones into bodily contours. Here, Daoist contemplation intersects with corporeal urgency, rendering touch as both index and transformation. Tingru Chen’s Safe House documents fragile shelters assembled from reclaimed fragments and local stones, situating architecture within a condition of precarity. Shelter emerges not as stability, but as a provisional arrangement against exposure, always subject to collapse and reconfiguration.
In this context, the digital no longer appears as weightless or abstract. Instead, it is understood as materially grounded, dependent on extraction, infrastructure, and planetary systems. If every screen carries a geological history, Lithic Coordinates proposes its inverse: that the body itself operates as a geological medium, stratified by memory, shaped by pressure, and marked by erosion. The exhibition does not resolve the tension between deep time and accelerated technological temporality. Rather, it sustains this tension as a productive condition.
What emerges is not a unified thesis but a perceptual and material framework. The mineral is no longer inert, the digital no longer immaterial, and perception itself becomes a process of sedimentation. Meaning does not stabilize but accumulates, disperses, and reforms. To encounter the exhibition is not to interpret geology, but to inhabit a world in which material, technological, and affective systems remain irreducibly entangled.
Installation view of Lithic Coordinates. Photo by Echo Xu. Courtesy of the artist and CHINCHIN Art.