With an artist-in-residency program, Imoved into Room 39 at the Lichterfelde Prison in Berlin, Germany on August 17,2016, and stayed in this room for 57 days. The prison is located in theoutskirts of town, the building is not tall, but quiet, only the metal gate atthe entrance can be sonorous. Room 39 is in the shape of a rectangle, measuring3.36 meters long and 2 meters wide, a rusted metal window through which thelight pierces in, placed high enough on the wall that I had to stand on the bedand raise my hand to reach it. The skylight that shines through the window isquite soft, even at noon it’s hardly unnoticeable.

I could hardly sleep on thefirst few days: the room becomes pitch dark, and there is no light in the corridor,and no bathroom in the room. I wondered about what prisoner who used to occupythis room looked like, what crime did he commit that sent him to prison? Whichplace did he spend most of his time in this room? What did he do in the room?Out of curiosity, I invited a translator to help me contact the former prisonguard via telephone and email, one week later, we found Stefen. We made anappointment to meet at Room 39 on August 29 for the first time.

My initial intention of looking up Stefenwas necessarily to make this into a work of art. I wanted to grasp a differentunderstanding about myself through this incident and this room, or to figureout whether this approach would challenge existing principles.

The course ofour exchange was interesting, and I did not expect that our encounter wouldlead to a number of ideas for the following works of art, allowing me toconnect an internal understanding through external contact. Thereon, I hadengrained one of stefen’s phrases into an axiom, “We sat here, chatted andchatted, and suddenly 12 years have gone by.”

This series of photographs beyond the smallroom had been something I wanted to experiment with over the last few yearsthat address the approaches to intervene on the environment, by redesigning andreinventing our ecology. With the questions of, “How to approach nature throughartificial means,” this series subjects nature, plants, the human body, andarchitectures to undergo a process of reform, which are then integrated into anunstable symbiosis. Meanwhile, I am aware that I am not a good “nature”.

Hereby, I would like to thank myinterpretor Zhang Qiongdan for helping to find Stefen.