Interview with Ye Wuji: Something Misplaced

At first, most of Ye Wuji's recent works seem to have grown out of his concern for a specific geographical area. Sometimes it is called 'Central Asia', and other times it has a name we are careful about bringing up in mainland China. In Ye's moving image works and artist's book, this geographical area's past and present, reality and fiction become intertwined. I am pulled by his works into debates about troubled geopolitical histories and the construction of ethno-national identities, yet the uncanny feeling that Ye was only joking kept reverberating. 

After interviewing Ye, I received a PDF from him. It was an electronic copy of Even in the Rain: Uyghur Music in Modern China, a book by ethnomusicologist and music historian Chuen-Fung Wong. In the first chapter of the book, there is a section called 'Of Spies and Thieves'. The author talks about how his research entails both understanding the pain and terror faced by Uyghur people, and confronting his own sense of guilt and powerlessness as an outsider, a Western researcher who is lucky enough to be able to leave the land – a spy and a thief. He writes: 'Rather, it was the practicing of a kind of vulnerability that I hoped would, idealistically, redress the colonial relationship inherited and implied in my ethnography.' The same vulnerability, exposed honestly and courageously in Ye's work, makes his questions about Central Asia touching and genuine. When social ruptures are impossible to be healed and violence dispersed, perhaps confronting one's own vulnerability in artistic practice creates the possibility for difficult conversations to take place.

Cindy Ziyun Huang

Cindy Ziyun Huang (CZH)

How about we start with the term 'Central Asia'? Why did you become interested in Central Asia?

Ye Wuji (YWJ)

I think it's important to clarify that 'Central Asia' means two different things for me before and after 2023. Before 2023, the term 'Central Asia' had a very practical role in my work as a figure of speech, or a research approach. In a previous project (Central Asia Journal, 2018-2021), 'Central Asia' was simply a strategy of referring to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, countries that border it and stories about it. To avoid getting into trouble, I used the less sensitive term 'Central Asia' as a strategic 'pseudonym'. The term 'Central Asia' in the project's title also indicated the complexity of the region explored by my work. While Xinjiang is a province inside China, I wanted to understand it through the lens of 'Central Asia', because a perspective beyond the nation-state is quite important if we want to think about the reality and history of that region, especially for most Chinese audiences. How can I put it? If you just approach Xinjiang from a perspective that places China proper – the historical 'Han lands' – in the centre, then it may look like a remote frontier. But with a shift in perspective, Xinjiang could very well be the centre. 

I also liked the ambiguity of the term 'Central Asia', which allowed me to connect it to other parts of my practice and research. This is something I only realised after three years of being interested in the region and feeling its pain. As a Han Chinese artist, I was quite ignorant about Xinjiang and Central Asia. But I was curious and full of questions. So, I spent a lot of time learning and thinking about how to tell a story about this land in a balanced and ethical way. I was really excited when I discovered that I could use the perspective of 'Central Asia' to thread through everything I was interested in, and I thought the connections the term enabled me to make were meaningful. I think that many of the different ethnic groups living in Central Asia are connected culturally in an interesting way. For example, at my dutar lesson earlier today, I learnt to play an Uzbek song. My Uyghur friends, however, said that their first reaction might not be to think that it was an Uzbek song – they would just think it was a very nice song instead.

CZH

Then what does 'Central Asia' become, after 2023, in your work?

YWJ

I'm not sure what exactly it has become, but it's definitely something very different. In 2023, I was supported by 'As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future'[1] and the Rockbund Art Museum to travel to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for two weeks. After actually being in Central Asia, I was less inclined to use the generic term 'Central Asia' to refer to any of the Central Asian countries, unlike before when I was intentionally vague. Instead, when talking about that trip, I now prefer to say 'Tashkent, Uzbekistan' or 'Almaty, Kazakhstan'. I feel that 'Central Asia' no longer fits my idea or approach. Once I had actually been to the region, I realised that its reality is different from the 'Central Asia' I had imagined. Maybe I noticed some counterexamples, and then I had a strong feeling of inconsistency and dislodgement. Sometimes, it surprised me, and sometimes it disappointed me. I had a feeling that not everyone could feel what I call 'Central Asian-ness'. Local people might experience vague cross-cultural connections in their daily lives, but they could be unaware of it, or maybe their minds were occupied by other things. When I say 'they', I'm thinking of Kazakhs who speak Russian at home, Uzbeks who hate plov (laughs), people who think that 'Central Asia' just means five countries, or people who don't know that the Uyghur land is also part of Central Asia.

But I did discover the 'Central Asian-ness' I had imagined in the natural and social landscapes I encountered during my trip, so I arrived at a tentative conclusion: this 'Central Asian-ness' does exist. It's in the air, in the soil, in the food…but it seems like it's not on the mind of many people I met in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In my new video, Something Misplaced (2023), I start asking myself, for the first time, what Central Asia is. It's an attempt to position myself and locate where the 'Central Asia' I care about is. There are parts of the 'real' Central Asia that I'm less concerned about, such as current political issues in Kazakhstan. I'm not interested in them and don't have the energy to look into them. Maybe what I'm interested in is still the previous 'Central Asia' I used as an excuse, a vague and vast land, where places are intertwined with each other.

Something Misplaced, single channel, colour, sound, 37min, 2023

CZH

You just made a distinction between the real Central Asia – specific countries, people who actually live there – and something that you refer to as 'Central Asian-ness'. It's an ideal of cross-cultural connection you constructed in your mind before you actually went to Central Asia. Where did this ideal come from?

YWJ

Initially, the concept of 'Central Asian-ness' came from my concern for Xinjiang and my desire to subvert the dominating historical discourse in China. We tend to have an extremely monolithic, homogenised and simplistic understanding of history. I think my research is slow - I don't know how to describe it yet, but the tiny details that attract me the most are the ones that challenge my understanding of history, reality or certain concepts. These details invite me to go into the world of 'Central Asia', and they may consist of very minute, specific and interesting connections between places, people or events. But sometimes they don't make sense as connections, and that's also very confusing for me.

I can't think of any good examples off the top of my head. For example, I recently came across two songs, one called 'Ili yoli' and the other called 'Andijan yoli'. 'Yoli' is roads, and 'Ili yoli' means something like 'the way to Ili', and 'Andijan yoli' means 'the way to Andijan'. I don't know the time period when these two songs were written, or even the lyrics, but they opened up a space of imagination for me. I thought of two moving routes of trade and migration. One is a busy trade route from Kashgar in the Tarim Basin to Andijan in the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan, and the other is a more painful route with a heavy history of forced uprootedness, stretching from Southern Xinjiang to the Ili Valley. The latter one reminds me of the migration history of the Taranchi.[2]

CZH

In your works, there are a lot of highly specific references and very concrete motifs, such as dutars, plovs, pichak daggers and tulips. But as your videos gradually unfold, the meaning of these seemingly tangible things begins to disintegrate, for example, the daggers in 'Phase 0: Pichak' of Central Asia Journal. In the beginning of the video, when I saw the first picture of the dagger, I knew what it was, but as different images of the dagger kept flashing by, I gradually became unsure about what these objects really were. I could feel a change from clarity to ambiguity, or from reality to fiction. A dagger gradually changes from a concrete object to an imaginary symbol – maybe one that encapsulates a Taobao shop owner's understanding of Central Asian cultures or a tourist's imagination of Xinjiang. However, when you described Central Asia to me just now, you mentioned very specific details. For example, you said that when you walked down a street, you would smell a unique scent and you would feel excited about being in the city. Central Asia is an embodied feeling and a real place, but also a concept, a construction, a fictional space. How do you understand the tension between the imaginary and the real in your work?

YWJ

I think what you described is very close to what I tried to express. I had in mind a clear narrative structure for Central Asia Journal. The transition from Phase 0 to 3 echoes my own journey of research and exploration. As the beginning of the project, 'Phase 0: Pichak' is the most ambiguous part, because I wanted it to re-enact my earliest experiences in the region, my feeling of being apprehensive and at a loss. The other video of the project presents a process of becoming clearer and more specific, and in the last video, I start describing one single individual. He is a fictional person, but an epitome of many real people I've met. For me, it doesn't matter whether my videos consist of fiction or reality because they generate each other. The kind of change between fiction and reality that you mentioned, I feel, is also very similar to the difference between a person's experience of an event and their memory of it. These two are also generative of each other. This process of generating is the reality – or the feeling – that I want to recover and reveal.

CZH

What does 'generative of each other' mean?

YWJ

For example, if you mix together rumours, gossip, historical documents and hearsay, then the memories, imaginations and details of what really happened will start supplementing each other, completing each other. Then, together they fabricate certain experiences. But they are still chaotic, like a riddle.

CZH

Your videos seem to convey a strong distrust of History, and they try to unsettle the viewer's trust in 'reality'. For example, in 'Phase II: Thus Spoke Abliz,' you ask, 'Isn't fact, just one of many presentations?' In 'Phase I: The Interpretation of pure Central Asia,' you say, 'I think it's because what is convincing isn't necessarily how real the story is.' In your videos, you let fictional stories, difficult-to-verify anecdotes and 'historical facts' from history books intertwine and permeate each other, making it hard to tell the real and the fake apart. In this process of intertwining, you constantly make people doubt the presumed authority of things like History, facts and reality. For you, why is it necessary to destabilise History and reality?

YWJ

The materials I use are sometimes real and sometimes fake. Whether they are truthful or not, what matters is that they can express the intensity of an experience or feeling. Here, the so-called truth and falsehood are not important because the expression itself is an urgent response to one's reality and confusions. What's more important is how to use history, memories and rumours to express one's experiences and feelings. Everything 'real' in this world may be accompanied by fiction, and all the truths told by individuals are even more fictional. I think when we say 'history', we often mean a permanent, certain and officially recognised history. But there are many other histories - the ones that have been sidestepped and discarded. It's only when we see these abandoned histories that we begin to understand reality better. If you don't confront those histories, sometimes you can feel like there is no way to understand reality at all.

Sometimes, when I'm chatting with someone, what they share is just their memories - not even their real memories because it is their recounting of other people's memories - but I remember the conversation so vividly and feel deeply connected to what that person has told me. Why is that? I think my practice has two parts. On the one hand, I have to research - read texts, check figures, go through the so-called archives, or even Wikipedia entries. What I feel when doing this research is very different from the feeling I have when listening to someone's family history. These two types of information are definitely connected, otherwise, it's impossible to locate the place of a personal story in the broader historical narrative. 

When it comes to history, I prefer to re-enact my own process of exploration. This is because I always worry that, if the viewer is faced with an overwhelming amount of true and false historical information, will they have the confidence and patience to unpack it slowly, like I did. If I can act out my own feeling of being touched or in pain, will that help the viewer to confront their own confusion and better explore history?

CZH

Could you tell me more about the ending of Something Misplaced. I really enjoyed the ending, partly because it is a conversation between two people, Y and T, who apparently struggle to communicate because of the language barrier. With hand gestures and Google Translate, they are having a laborious chat about T's family history. Pointing at the map on his mobile phone, T tries to explain to Y that, even though his hometown and his grandfather's hometown are separated by a national border, they are so close in distance that he can look out from one and see the other. This struck a chord with me so strongly because I felt that even though the story is insignificant and mundane, and even though it's told in a prosaic way, I can recognise profound reflection on the issues of borders, historical violence and the constructedness of ethnic-national identities. I felt like I could discern the shadow of these things in that seemingly inconsequential conversation between Y and T. The other reason why I like the ending is that it's sharply humorous and sarcastic. By the end of Y and T's chat, the video's soundtrack changes into a piece of sentimental music, and some melancholic landscape images show up one by one like a slideshow, as if the work is falling into a melodramatic cliché. Then, the puppets from the video's beginning jump out on the screen and start rapping loudly. I found the humour particularly poignant and sharp.

YWJ

Well put. That's pretty much what I intended for the ending to do. I'd say that my creativity is often an afterthought. For example, when something happens on a trip, it'll take a long period of brewing and rumination for me to realise why it's interesting or to start considering how I can integrate it into my work. But by then I've already missed the opportunity to document it, and I don't want to revisit a place or recreate a set for the camera, mainly because I don't have the budget. So I often assemble footage from the Internet and found materials to re-enact what happened. 

However, the conversation you saw at the end of Something Misplaced is a rare example of intentional documentation I made. On that day, I suddenly realised the conversation I was having was a precious one. I rarely film anything with such clear intention - I knew at the time I needed to record the scene in a radical way. Later, when I made the video, I further played with text-to-speech conversion, meticulously describing everything in the video through a monologue. I also really love the sense of awkwardness and clumsiness in that conversation - it speaks of a deep sincerity. I think that's one of art's remaining purposes. Especially when it comes to research-led art, what techniques should one use to express emotions, how can one represent the intensity of reality, and how can one convert research into something stickier? You can't just churn it out and print everything. So how do you represent that precious thing?

Something Misplaced, single channel, colour, sound, 37min, 2023

CZH

At the very beginning of Something Misplaced, you actually already questioned the effectiveness of art as a method or medium. The two puppets at the beginning of the video, Effendi and Wuji, explain that they made an artwork about Central Asia because art seemed to be the 'highest form of communication' in the world. If the purpose is to tell the history and represent the reality of Central Asia or a specific ethnic group with clarity, we probably would rely on historians or anthropologists instead of artist. If the purpose is to push for real social changes, we would then rely on politians or activists to do it more effectively. So, why do we choose art as an approach when we try to organise our thinking about Central Asia, when we try to understand its past and present? What does art do? 

YWJ

That beginning was meant to be a joke: all I could do was just to make a lazy video after a whole trip. Like you said, art is probably not the medium that one can use to tell the history and reality of Central Asia with the most clarity and certainty. But I think art definitely tells the most ambiguous story. When you create something, you draw inspiration from reality and combine your feelings with research. The result of this process is not always clear. Instead, it may end up being a mystery. If handled well, it can be a mystery that sheds light on the heterogeneity of things' meanings. I have never actually thought of doing anything for others with my art. Perhaps my artistic expression has been driven by my sense of disgust towards certain things, such as ugly stereotypes of ethnic groups, flattening historical narratives, the distress caused by identity and a tense and desperate social atmosphere. But my main purpose is still to express myself fully. Don't start with too many questions. I think the reason for making art is, first of all, to solve my own confusion. What is my confusion? What is my pain? How does it relate to Central Asia? I think the reason why many audiences like 'Phase III: My Friend' of Central Asia Journal is because I have exposed the difficulties I struggle with. If art has to be effective, it should be effective for myself first.

CZH

Do you ever try to extend that effectiveness to others as well? In your vidoes and artist's book, Palov-osh vol.6-Central Asia Journal, there is a huge amount of information, and you inundate the viewer with a lot of historical facts and anecdotes related to Central Asia. For example, in Something Misplaced, you keep asking 'do you know?'. At first glance, it feels like you're offering an introductory lesson - but in reality, it leaves me thinking, 'How could I possibly know this? How could anyone?' The sheer amount of knowledge required is overwhelming. I can't imagine how devoted a viewer would have to be in order to go through all the information you provided and answer every question. You keep asking 'do you know?', but who is the 'you' you addressed, and who is the audience you imagined? Apart from solving the puzzle for yourself and making the work effective for yourself, have you thought about having an impact on anyone else?

YWJ

Of course I want the work to be effective for other people too, but I don't think it's for me to control. I don't want to presume who the audience is, and I've never wanted to use my work to introduce or help the audience to know 'Central Asia'. In fact, maybe I want the opposite, maybe I want to confuse the audience as much as I was confused at the beginning (laughs). Obviously I don't want to tell people what Central Asia is. I myself don't know what it is. Maybe I have always wanted to subvert the clear, unambiguous, easy and authoritative historical narrative, and that's why I presented the total opposite, making everything seem confusing.

I think the 'you' in Something Misplaced is sometimes just me. I'm just re-presenting issues that I've encountered during my trips. But this 'you' did develop a new dimension when I went to Central Asia, because I met a lot of people there who could resonate with my confusion. Some people educated me, while others disappointed and surprised me. Some of the questions in my video are from a questionnaire I made when I was in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. I tried to find a way to get some information out of every person I met whom I could talk to. For example, if I met a Kazakh person, I would ask them questions like: do you feel closer to Chinese Kazakh immigrants in Kazakhstan or citizens of Kazakhstan of Russian descent? Or do you think Kazakhs from China and Kazakhs from Kazakhstan have more differences or more in common?

Something Misplaced, single channel, colour, sound, 37min, 2023

CZH

Why do you include an artist's book in the project Central Asia Journal? If visitors at the exhibition site watche the film first and then read the book, they seem to be able to find answers to many of their questions in the book. However, the book does not guarantee that all the information it provides is factual. If they think about it more, they will still find it difficult to distinguish between truth and fiction. The book actively reminds the reader to put a question mark over their trust in it. What is the book's function in the project? 

YWJ

You're actually the first person to give me so much feedback about the book, probably because when people saw it at the exhibition, they treated it as some additional vitrine materials they could just casually filp through. For me, it is something that plays a complementary role. My initial idea was that it would be nice to have a physical book, especially because all the videos in the project, other than 'Phase III: My Friend', were abstract and difficult to grasp. I thought it would be more fun to have a book that visitors can hold in their hands to flip through and compare with the videos – well, now I was thinking about who the audience was (laughs). There was also a psychiatric report hanging from a tandoor skewer set at the exhibition. (CZH: Was that a real report?) No, no no, but I wrote it after reading a lot of medical papers about mental disorders, and it was written like a real report. It's actually kind of like the answer to a riddle.

I made that book also because I had so many threads of thoughts that I felt I couldn't put into my video work. For example, the tulips that you mentioned earlier. I saw tulips everywhere in the Xinjiang cities I did my research in. For a Han Chinese like me, or for most mainland Chinese people, I think tulips represent European cultures, right? That's how I interpreted it at first, and I thought that maybe the local government considered tulips as a more attractive tourist icon and thought it could make the city look better or something like that. But one day I looked it up and found out that tulips are originally a Central Asian plant. That surprised me greatly, and then I looked up why the flower was called 'Tulip'. The origin of the name is related to turbans worn by Muslim men. At the time, the 'People's War on Terror' in Xinjiang was in full swing, and anything that had anything to do with Islamic culture or halal food – visual or literal – had disappeared, in compliance with local policies. I remember joking about this with a grocery shop owner. I said the label of his apple juice didn’t say if it was halal, and the owner said he'd already be in jail if it did say it. Back to the tulip, it was originally connected to Islamic culture. I found that connection intriguing and was inspired by it. It added another layer to how I understand certain things and feel about reality. But I didn't think this episode would 'fit in' my video works, because it feels too strange to spell it out like that. I didn't know how to use it.

CZH

Does this feeling of not being able to fit something in come from the fact that the episode itself is not inline with the conventional mode of historical storytelling?

YWJ

Maybe alternative ways of expression are needed.

CZH

​​You use archival materials – like old photographs, footage, oral family histories – but also very kitsch materials that I don’t even know how to describe. For example, product photos with Taobao watermarks, Karaoke subtitles that scroll in time with the music, and emojis like Tiktok effects. Some of the found images you use are very 'serious' historical materials, and some are very kitschy, very pop culture. There's a strong contrast between those two parts.

YWJ

I haven't really thought about it too much. I don't have a particularly interesting answer to give you. This is my aesthetic preference - I really like memes and I think they are very dynamic. For the project Central Asia Journal, I actually used moving images in very different ways for each video. Similarly, each section of Something Misplaced has a different approach. In the beginning, I employed a cliche essay-film approach where I included just a very artsy voice-over (laughs). The second section stimulates my experience organising the field trip materials after I came back from the trip. I really didn't know what to do with all the messy materials I brought back. I took a whole bunch of photos, some of which I didn't even know why I had taken. I had to go through them one by one to see if I could use any. I don't usually take photos on purpose, I just take snapshots of anything I feel vaguely special about, and then I tidy them up when I’m back to see how I can use them to express my feelings and what I want to say. So that second section simulates my whole journey, starting from the feeling of being bamboozled - I didn't expect Central Asia to be like that at all and I certainly didn't expect the communication difficulties to be so significant. By the time I was chatting with T in the section later on, I had gotten a little bit more used to using translation software. 

The footage of that section is also one of the rarer ones that I filmed consciously while the conversation unfolded. That's why I use so many memes I found on the Internet. I want to re-enact my feelings and experiences with memes. Some of those feelings made an impression in my head, but I didn’t even think about filming anything at the time. When I come back to organise my materials and try to build a narrative, sometimes I know an episode from my experience can be used, but I don't have any evidence of it, so I just download a lot of my materials from various platforms. For example, a lot of the landscape photos in ‘Phase II: Thus Spoke Abliz’ look like they were taken by me in Xinjiang or Central Asia, but in fact they are all downloaded for free from stock image websites (laughs).

Ye Wuji, Central Asia Journal Phase 3: My Friend, Single-channel video, colour, sound,14 minutes 20 seconds, 2018

CZH

The memes in your work are really hilarious. Is is a subconscious decision to add humorous elements into your videos?

YWJ

I think it's good for art to be funny. I don't like works that are too serious. I think it's easy for art to become pretentious when it's so serious. Maybe it's because sometimes I like things that are particularly crude, and I like things that everyone can make. For example, in WeChat, when you send certain phrases in a chat, don't emojis drop down from the top of the screen? During my first trip to Xinjiang, although I hadn't heard of any concentration camps at that time, the locals were already very stressed and careful. I thought, can I tell a story about this place with emojis? I like emoji very much. Then I used some emoji related to the local social reality in my work.

CZH

You mentioned that how you use footage changes within the same video or across different videos. Can you elaborate on that?

YWJ

I don't want the stories I told to be immersive. I like interruptions. That's also very similar to my own learning process: when I was in Central Asia and Xinjiang, there were so many random and messy things that kept popping up and interrupting my work. Maybe it was reality itself that interrupted my learning process, or maybe it was the learning process that entered the corresponding reality. I think immersion is something that movies can  better achieve. Anyway, I always consciously create interruptions.

CZH

You often use maps in your films. For example, in a film, you searched for Central Asia in Google Maps and showed the viewer a precise and scientific satellite map. However, your works keep blurring the definition of 'Central Asia', making people more and more unsure of what and where Central Asia is. With a sense of displacement and inconsistency, 'Central Asia' reveals its past and presence in many thick layers, but  it also seems like the region doesn't exist at all. These layers show traces left by so many different countries, regimes, cultures and peoples. It's hard to say whether they reflect the Uyghur culture, the Soviet culture, the Chinese Communist culture, or something else. Your work is not engaging with today's Central Asia, but something else – what exactly is it?

YWJ

Is that a question for me? I don't think I have an answer. Sometimes I wonder what's the point of me making these videos. I have doubts about my work. I don't know what else to do in the future. Central Asia is such a complicated region, and I have to go through so much trouble just trying to know it better, so what’s the point of me exploring it? I used to have a pressing impulse to express myself, to figure out my confusion and why the reality of Xinjiang is the way it is. That's what led me to Central Asia. I went there to learn about its history but remained pessimistic because there was no way to resolve past and present conflicts. Previously, I had felt that it would never be wise to approach Xinjiang's socio-political issues in isolation, and it had felt necessary to connect the region to a wider Central Asian context. Something that completely changed my mind during this trip was the fact that Xinjing did appear to be, at times, isolated from Central Asia. Maybe it's not exaggerating too much to say that Xinjiang almost felt non-existent in Central Asia. The trip also challenged my worship of Central Asia. For example, I realised being a native Uzbek speaker doesn’t mean knowing more about what 'Central Asia' is. Now that I have spent time in both Central Asia and Xinjiang, I no longer think of them as a superset and a subset. I now see them as equal geographical terms. I think my work still revolves mainly around Xinjiang. For me, the trip felt a bit like entering a building with its floor plan in my hands, only to go in and realise that what I see isn't quite what I have imagined. But that doesn't mean something is wrong. It only means that the building has gone through many years of alterations and renovations. We can go into the building ourselves to check each wall and confirm its structure. How many times has the place been renovated? Why was it changed? What stayed the same and what became different? By observing and revealing the similarities and the parts with subtle differences, we could make sense of things that can’t be imagined, that may be stuck and out of place. But right now I still have doubts about why any of this is relevant for me. Or maybe it means I've lost that pressing impulse.

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Notes

[1]As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future is initiated and conceived by Biljana Ciric. The inquiry and research cells include What Could Should Curating Do (Belgrade), Zdenka Badovinac (Ljubljana), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), ArtCom (Astana), Robel Temesgen and Sinkneh Eshetu (Addis Ababa), and The Bor Public Library.

[2]The Taranchi were settled Muslim serfs who were displaced from southern Xinjiang to northern Xinjiang during the Qing Dynasty. They were once recognized as a separate ethnic group in modern times but were later reclassified as part of the Uyghur ethnicity.

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受访艺术家

叶无忌，1991年出生于中国内地。2013年在火焰山下被热瓦普的琴声击中并收到感召。他后来成为了中亚抓饭协会（CAPS）的会员并笃信抓饭是世上最美味的食物。

采访人、译者

黄梓耘是一名生活在伦敦的编辑、写作者和翻译。她有关当代艺术的写作见于《Fetch Magazine》，《ArtReview艺术世界》、《岛聚》等。她的虚构写作见于包括《Sine Theta Magazine》和《Tiny Molecules》在内的文学杂志。她在2024年获选成为伦敦短片电影节的委任写作者和伦敦Queer East电影节的新生批评人。