About the Series · The Homeland Plan
From the end of 2007 to 2010, after closing his commercial collaborations, the artist spent two years building a homeland with his own hands according to ancient methods. He broke the Naxi “three wings and a screen wall” form, integrating the space with the Buddhist swastika structure (卍) — enclosure and openness interwoven, dwelling and exhibition hall merged. From quarrying stone and felling timber to ramming earth walls and raising mortise-and-tenon beams, real and heavy physical labour ran through the whole. Until one evening, when the artist walked home from the site treading the setting sun, and the wind blew across the field path over his illuminated figure, and he suddenly understood: “I am he, and he is I” — the grandfather he never met descended at that moment; the ancestor was found, and the self also became an ancestor. This is at once an actual dwelling and a continually growing work and personal museum.
Full Essay
The Homeland Plan
After closing the dealer collaborations in three cities in 2009, the artist was released from market anxiety and turned to a fundamental question: can art exist solely to trace the source of the “self”?
Two Years of Building by Ancient Methods
From the end of 2007 to 2010, the artist spent two years building a homeland with his own hands following ancient Naxi methods, yet broke the traditional “three wings and a screen wall” form with the Buddhist swastika structure (卍), creating a new kind of architecture at once enclosed and open, at once traditional and modern. These two years were real and heavy physical labour: going up the mountain to quarry stone, down to the river to fell timber, beating the rammed channel-wall repeatedly for forty-nine days; felling fir at the winter solstice and drying it on the flat for months; chiselling mortise and tenon by hand, replacing mechanical precision with the unevenness of axe and adze. No outsourcing, no machinery, only the slow dialogue of a person with material, tool and time.
The Swastika Structure
The swastika structure was converted into the core of spatial organisation: the central emptiness is a courtyard open to the sky, at once a light well and a spiritual focus; the four arms extend into spaces for dwelling, making, collecting and receiving, independent yet mutually permeable; the corner transitions are half-open grey zones; the spiral circulation unfolds along the swastika, each turn a change in the mood of the space. This structure breaks the ethical hierarchy of elders in the main hall and juniors in the wings, dissolving the fixed relation of centre and margin through rotational symmetry.
The Realisation on the Field Path
The long building took nearly two years. One day, returning home from the site, treading the setting sun along the field path, in the instant the wind passed and the light struck his figure, an ancient recognition descended — “I am he, and he is I.” The grandfather he had never met, that Naxi headman and old village head, had through these two years of physical labour entered his body as muscle memory. To search for the grandfather is to become the grandfather; to trace the ancestors finally points to one's own destiny of becoming an ancestor. This is not a mystical illumination but the inevitable fruit of physical labour — the two hands holding the axe in the grandfather's way, the shoulders carrying timber in the grandfather's way, the body completing the handover of identity earlier than consciousness. The setting sun, the field path and the wind became the plain witnesses of an anthropological ritual.
Time and Fusion
The clay of the Lijiang flat, the fir of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and the cobbles of the Jinsha River acquire new meaning within the swastika structure. The artist preserved the traces of the hand: the bamboo-strip drag marks on the rammed-earth wall, the unevenness of axe and chisel on the wooden beams, the tiny misalignments of the mortise and tenon — these are the marks of reconciliation after a contest with time. The channel-wall technique was strictly carried out, and the wall regulates humidity by itself, “breathing” to protect the archive. Residual earth from the family's old house was mixed into the rammed earth, completing the continuation of the bloodline at the material level.
The four arms of the swastika structure blur the boundary between dwelling and display, function shifting fluidly with need. The central courtyard can serve both meditation and exhibition — life itself is display, and display itself is life.
Continual Growth
The “Homeland Plan” marks the turn from “the body as medium” toward “the environment as an extension of the body.” After the realisation, the homeland is no longer a “monument for the grandfather” but a “vessel for living as the grandfather” — designer and builder, master and labourer, contemporary artist and traditional craftsman, grandson and grandfather: these identities, divided by modern society, are recast into a whole person.
This homeland, founded over two years and growing continually since, carries three identities: an actual living space, a personal art museum, and an anthropological artefact and vehicle of DNA tracing. As of 2026 it is still evolving — every reworking, extension and repair is the growth of the work, and a continuing dialogue with grandfather, ancestors and the landscape.
In the future, when the building stops, this swastika-structured homeland will become an open monument — proof of how a human being, in an age of rupture, through heavy physical labour and radical structural imagination, found the ancestors again and became an ancestor.