Contours of Memory

No projection technology is used in Yang Song’s Contours of Memory. The luminous forms visible within the installation are produced through natural light reflection across an extensive structure of steel wire.

Created for the 2026 Wuhan Biennale, the work combines 50,000 metres of wire with window frames, chairs and other materials collected from the city’s streets and alleys. Its construction took approximately two weeks.

As light moves across the suspended lines, the contours of familiar domestic objects appear and recede. A wooden window can be recognised momentarily before dissolving into the surrounding structure. A chair becomes an outline without a body.

These objects once belonged to the everyday spaces of Wuhan. Removed from their original settings, they retain physical evidence of the lives and routines that surrounded them without revealing those histories completely.

Yang asks whether memory has a definite form. Here, memory is neither fixed nor fully recoverable. It emerges through the relationship between object, light and viewer, remaining visible only under particular conditions.