EXHIBITION
Promise (b. 2002) was born in Wuhan, China, and is based in London, a graduate of Central Saint Martins with an MA in Fine Art. Working across photography, moving image, installation, and field research, his practice is grounded in walking as a primary mode of perception. He returns repeatedly to riverbeds, tidal islands, and hydraulic sites, dwelling and observing, examining how human regimes of measurement, control, and infrastructure impose themselves upon natural processes, and tracing the moments where such impositions fail, fracture, or give rise to unexpected forms of relation.
After leaving Wuhan for Chengdu, Promise became aware for the first time of a difficult-to-name dependency between himself and rivers, a sensation of water's absence, slow and persistent. Years later, arriving in London, the tides of the Thames drew him back into the domain of water, awakening memories of the Yangtze, of floods, of the rhythms of rivers from his childhood. It is this bodily experience across three cities that has made rivers, for him, a way of knowing the world.
His recent research unfolds along two rivers in parallel, the Thames and the Yangtze. These two rivers form the geographic coordinates of his lived experience while spanning distinct geographic and political contexts; yet they share a common history in which colonial surveying, hydraulic infrastructure, and state-administered control repeatedly converged, remaking natural water systems into objects of quantification and governance. From this, Promise develops the working concept of material wetness, drawing on Smithson's Nonsite logic of allowing dry, indoor matter to stand in for an absent site. There is no real water in the work, yet the materials carry the memory and trace of water's action upon them; the viewer encounters dry objects while sensing the force of flood, erosion, and submersion. The dialectic between wet and dry is both a perceptual tension and a methodological stance.
陈诺（b.2002）出生于中国武汉，常驻伦敦，中央圣马丁艺术硕士毕业。他的工作横跨摄影、影像、装置与田野研究，以步行作为核心的感知方式。他常常在河滩、潮汐岛等水利地带反复行走、停留与观察，探索人类的测量系统、控制机制与基础设施如何将自身强加于自然过程之上，以及这些强加在何处失效、断裂，或催生出意想不到的关联形式。
离开武汉移居成都后，陈诺第一次意识到自己与河流之间某种难以言明的依存关系，那是一种对水的缺席的感知，迟钝而持续。数年后来到伦敦，泰晤士河的潮汐重新将他带回水的领域，唤醒了他对长江、对洪水、对童年时期河流运作的记忆。正是这种跨越三座城市的身体经验，使河流在他的实践中成为一种认识世界的方式。
其近期研究围绕泰晤士河与长江双线展开。这两条河流既是他生命经验的地理坐标，也横跨不同的地理与政治语境，却共享相似的历史：殖民测量、水利设施与现代国家权力在此反复叠加，将自然水系改造为可管理、可量化的对象。由此，陈诺发展出"物质湿性"这一工作概念，借鉴史密森非在地（Nonsite）的结构逻辑，以室内的干燥材料代替缺席的河流现场。他的作品中没有真实的水，却携带着水曾经作用于物质的记忆与痕迹，观众面对的是干燥的物体，感受到的是淹没、冲刷与渗透的力量。湿与干的辩证，既是感知层面的张力，也指向一种方法论立场。