Steel Garden

2025

Two-channel Video Installation

UHD, Color, Sound, Stereo

45'10"

Chapter I  Flower Hymn, 7'25"

Chapter II  Dreaming the Butterfly,18'15"

Chapter III  Forging Dust, 19'30"

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Steel Garden is a dual-channel video installation and the latest work by Yao Qingmei. The project is based on the large-scale floral displays constructed each year during national celebrations. Through a series of carefully composed and haunting images—close-ups of flowers, birds foraging in the gaps, wild grass growing between paving stones, the varied postures of visitors, and the synchronized movements of crowds during flag-lowering ceremonies—Yao Qingmei reveals the subtle relationships between individual actions, collective ritual, and constructed nature.

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This multi-chapter video work opens with news-style reports about flowers specially cultivated for ceremonial use and closes with a sound poem created from the artist’s personal perspective, drifting like dust in the air. Informed by Gilles Clément’s thinking on the “Moving Garden,” particularly in its attention to overlooked details within highly ordered ceremonial landscapes, the work incorporates passages from the Soviet novel How the Steel Was Tempered describing the soldier Pavel Korchagin’s experiences of pain and hallucination. In doing so, the work exposes the biopolitical framework hidden beneath monumental ceremonial practices.

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