Eating the Mountain

“The landscape swallows us; we swallow the landscape.” In an era where landscapes steadily recede and identities drift across borders, the question of selfhood returns with renewed urgency: Who am I? Where do I come from? The exhibition Eating the Mountain takes its title from a rural Chinese idiom that once described a way of living in symbiosis with the land — a form of survival that was at once practical and poetic. Revisited today, this phrase transforms into a cultural metaphor, one that speaks to the intimate entanglement of food, soil, body, and memory in shaping our sense of belonging. Eating the Mountain approaches invisibility from another direction: the slow withdrawal of landscapes, the quiet fading of terroir. What is swallowed is not only food, but also memory, language, and the residue of place—while the overlooked land, in turn, begins to swallow us. Here, “eating” becomes an act of perception, where taste and touch expose the fractures of belonging. Through diverse artistic media, the exhibition gestures toward unfinished sentences and fragile attachments, asking: as land recedes, how does identity persist? When words fall silent, in what ways does memory remain? The mountain in this context is more than a topographical form. It is a site of cultural layering and bodily experience, a silent witness to migration and displacement, a fault line where languages fracture and histories remain unfinished. It represents both endurance and vulnerability — a symbol of the physical ground we inhabit and the emotional terrain we carry within. By bringing together artists working across media and disciplines, Eating the Mountain offers a space where these ideas converge. The exhibition encourages audiences to reflect on how acts of consuming and being consumed resonate within contemporary life. What does it mean to “swallow” a place, and what remains when the place itself swallows us? How might memory, taste, and landscape interweave into new narratives of identity in a world of shifting geographies? Producer: Yiru Wang Curator: Jiabin Xu Curatorial Execution: Wenwei Li & Yi Lai Co-Hosted: D&E Foundation Project Coordinator (D&E Foundation)：Kexin Liang In collaboration with: SaturnVII Studio Featuring Artists: Sophie Kyriakopoulou Xinyue Ma & Alexander Collinson Ember Wanbo Li, Freya Yuejie Li, Yifei Deng and Zihan Liu Ying Huang Yimeng Li Xie Cheng Xueshijia Wang Sheng Zhang Boxio3