"When a stranger passes by, they leave behind a small movement of air… I've come to think of that movement as a trace of another life crossing my own." — Ze-Cheng Li

CNTRFLD. Your solo exhibition Where Wind Begins centres on movement, atmosphere, and what you’ve described as “invisible forces”. Could you start by talking us through how this body of work came into being—what first set it in motion?

ZCL. I don't think the work began with an idea. It began with a habit. I've always enjoyed walking without a destination. If I have time, I'll take my camera and wander through streets and alleyways for hours. I'm not looking for a particular image. I'm waiting for something to happen—to my attention, to my body, to the space around me.

One experience has stayed with me for years. When a stranger passes by, they leave behind a small movement of air. I don't know who they are, and I'll probably never see them again, but for a brief moment the wind they leave behind meets me. I've come to think of that movement as a trace of another life crossing my own. Every passer-by carries a story, even if that story remains unknowable.

That feeling eventually became Where Wind Begins . I wasn't interested in representing wind as a natural phenomenon. What interested me was the possibility that something almost imperceptible could reveal the presence of another body, another journey, another way of inhabiting the world. Perhaps that's where all my work begins—not with images, but with encounters.

CNTRFLD. There’s a strong sense in your practice of things never quite settling—images appearing and dissolving, materials responding to air and light. What draws you to this state of instability, and how did it become central to the way you work?

ZCL. I don't experience the world as something stable. Even the most familiar places are always disappearing as we move through them. A simple example is sitting on a bus. You might travel the same route every day, looking at the same buildings through the same window, but that landscape only exists for a few seconds. The bus keeps moving, the image slips away, and before long you've arrived somewhere else.

What seems permanent is actually made up of countless passing moments. I'm interested in working with materials that behave in the same way. Mesh, translucent fabric and suspended images never completely settle. They respond to air, to light and, most importantly, to the presence of people moving around them. The work is never entirely still because our experience of the world is never entirely still. I'm less interested in preserving memory than in remaining faithful to the fleeting nature of perception itself.

CNTRFLD. You’ve spoken about identity not as something fixed, but as a shifting condition that continually repositions how you understand space and presence. How has your own experience shaped this way of thinking—and how consciously does it enter the work?

ZCL. My experience has definitely shaped this way of thinking, but I do not want the work to become only about myself. I am interested in the self as something more open. When I say “myself”, I often think of it as something shared — not only me as an individual, but any body moving through the world and trying to establish a sense of place.

Living between different cities and cultures has made me aware that identity is not something solid. It is constantly repositioned by language, memory, architecture, movement, and the people around us. But rather than representing identity directly, I prefer to create situations where viewers can sense this shifting condition through their own bodies. In that sense, the work does not ask the viewer to understand my identity. It invites them to enter a space where they may become aware of their own.

CNTRFLD. Thinking back to your early life, are there particular moments, environments, or influences from your childhood or upbringing that you now recognise as formative in your practice?

ZCL. Looking back, I think my sensitivity to disappearing places comes from growing up around environments that were constantly changing. Streets, buildings, neighbourhoods, and domestic objects could disappear very quickly. At the time, I may not have fully understood what that meant, but later I realised that these changes had shaped how I think about memory and place.

My series Blind Alley came from this feeling. It is connected to childhood memories, but also to the way urban renewal can erase the emotional texture of a place. I was interested in how materials such as concrete, metal, resin, lace, and old domestic fragments could hold traces of something that no longer exists. So my childhood did not influence me through one single event, but through a repeated awareness that places are fragile. They can be removed physically, but emotionally they continue to echo.

CNTRFLD. Your work often feels as though it sits between places—between presence and absence, image and environment. For audiences in the UK and Europe, how do you reflect on your own diasporic experience within this, and what it means to make work from that position?

ZCL. Making work from a diasporic position means that place is never completely given. It has to be sensed, approached, and slowly built. I do not feel that I simply belong to one fixed location. Instead, I am always negotiating between different memories, languages, and spatial experiences. This condition has made me more attentive to the gap between space and place. A space only becomes a place when we experience it, when our body begins to form a relationship with it.

This idea is close to Yi-Fu Tuan’s thinking, but for me it is also something very personal and bodily. In the UK and Europe, I often feel that I am moving through spaces that are familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. This in-between position allows me to remain open. I do not take place for granted. I have to keep sensing it, and that process becomes part of the work.