Journey to China

My journey to China was neither a simple geographical displacement nor a sequence of exhibitions. It was a passage. A concentrated time of work, visions, encounters, and perceptual verifications that tested — and in part completed — an artistic research developed in silence for more than fifteen years.

I arrived in China with a clear intention: not to describe the country, but to allow the country to interrogate my work. Not to seek iconic images, but to verify whether my language — made of light, image, sound, transformation, and impermanence — could inhabit cultural, social, and perceptual contexts profoundly different from European ones, without losing its identity.

From the very first days, I understood that China does not offer itself as an immediate spectacle. It is a complex, stratified system, where order and acceleration coexist, where technology is never merely ornament but everyday infrastructure, and where the relationship between the individual and public space follows logics different from ours. This difference was not an obstacle for me, but a resonance: many of the themes running through my research — impermanence, indeterminacy, the relationship between control and trust, between the visible and the invisible — found here a fertile and surprisingly kindred ground.

In this month of work, I was finally able to realize Neural Temple not as a fragment or an excerpt, but as an almost complete organism: a perceptual device that does not propose images to be consumed, but environments to be crossed inwardly. A sensitive architecture in which light, sound, image, and time build thresholds of experience capable of generating attention, slowing down, and resonance.

The three installations realized in Shenzhen, Xiamen, and Harbin were not simply three exhibitions, but three articulations of the same body, three different organs of a single research, adapted to radically different contexts. Precisely this chameleonic capacity of the work — its ability to transform without betraying itself — has been one of the strongest confirmations to emerge from this experience.