Feral Sediment, Yining Fei’s first solo exhibition in New York, centers on the milu, a rare species of deer native to China. Working across sculpture, moving image, and installation, Fei treats the milu, whose survival has been mediated by captivity, diplomacy, and modern infrastructure, as a vessel through which to imagine an ecological future.
For hundreds of years, most milu roamed in a state of semi-captivity, protected in the Qing Imperial Hunting Ground. After a 1894 flood breached the imperial walls, they were hunted to the point of extinction, surviving as a species only because a small number had been transported to European zoos (and later, to an English duke’s estate).
First reintroduced to China as diplomatic gifts and then scientifically bred in the 1980s, the milu, which now number in the thousands, had no unmediated wilderness to return to. They rest amid wind farm towers, cross paved roads, and wander freely into farmland. The exhibition originates in Fei’s observations of the morphological similarities between the lining of the deer’s digestive organs and aerial views of natural landscapes and modern infrastructure, a coincidence that opens an inquiry into what separates wildness from domestication.
Through ceramic viscera, Fei constructs the milu’s interior organs as a cosmos in miniature, a space where the biological and the artificial, the intimate and the planetary, converge. A glazed heart rotates like a trotting horse lantern (zou ma deng), casting the silhouette of a deer in recursive gallop. At SculptureCenter, the deer’s body becomes a medium where multiple histories, the present, and speculative futures are digested into the same matter, impossible to disentangle.
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