Evening Harmony
A collaboration exhibition with Zi Qin and Jincheng Deng at FIRSTDRAFT
2025
A Languid Vertigo
By Anthea Duffy
For Evening Harmony by Dean Qiulin Li, Zi Qin, and Jincheng Deng
The public park provides a kind of intimacy that can’t be experienced in private.
Each one is just exposed enough, just visible and safe enough, to guarantee the presence of a nearby hiding place. Each is immediately familiar. The park’s format is reliable, dotted around cities and suburbs so frequently that reprieve is easy and guaranteed. It serves to us a palatable portion of the natural world that we can access without threat. It is always lit, always soft, always ready to cradle our indiscretions.
We are coaxed by the park’s promise of relief, entering it as players upon an expectant stage. In daylight, children become rulers and gamemakers, finally authorised to treat their imaginations as legitimate. During stolen hours, adults find refuge, free to confess to friends and relinquish to lovers. The evenings look on as teenagers are made invincible, the consequences for deviant behaviour evaporating in a perceived limbo governed by hypothetical rules.
Dean Qiulin Li, Zi Qin, and Jincheng Deng have orchestrated a play to begin on this stage at nightfall. Props of the park, left scattered from a daytime thoroughfare, lie in wait for the new authority of night. Those props are malleable in their discard; traffic lights, shopping trolley, a street lamp under faint rain. The stage is familiar but carefully unspecific, summoning a sentimentality that doesn’t discriminate. We roam across it and find ourselves prompted to access a memory that is inevitable to each of us: the murmur of a city under the lapsing eye of dusk.
On a bed of AstroTurf and under lights that emanate only from the included works, this show is overwhelmingly artificial. These are simulations that do not trick, but instead permit us to re-encounter the park with their honest, eerie dissection of it. Li’s backlit photographs are staged reconstructions of remembered moments from the urban night. Qin’s memories of the streetlight and its cloak of rain are reinvented and portioned behind screens. Deng’s sculptures are paused moments in the abstracted movement of the ‘Man Catcher’, a device used by local authorities in China to restrain individuals. Just as the park portions our landscape so that we might begin to view it as malleable, so too does this show invite us to control our encounters with the night.
The making of Li, Qin, and Deng honours their own recounted experiences in truthful fragment and sensation. The ambiguity of their work is generous and allows us to insert our memories, tentatively and fondly, into theirs. Our imaginations are bolstered and their value is endorsed as we are granted the permission, finally, to play.