Yining Fei: Feral Sediment

Ferality is often used as a political tool to designate subversive forms of life that seek survival within, while testing the limits of, a given order. Yining Fei’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., Feral Sediment, centers on this condition of being neither wild nor tame through the case of the milu (Père David’s deer). Having lived in a state of semi-captivity in the Qing Imperial Hunting Ground for hundreds of years, milu suffered local extinction in the early 20th century in China, surviving as a species only because a small number had been transported to European zoos (and later, to an English duke’s estate). Their return to China, first as diplomatic gifts in the 1950s, made them the subject of an “innocent but laudable” repatriation story, as described by the UK Far Eastern Department, and a tale of “heroic homecoming,” as told by the Chinese state press.

Fei’s fieldwork in 2025 followed the rewilding initiative of the returned milu. Prompted by whether a drive towards the unruly exists at all after their centuries of captivity, the exhibition reimagines a deer’s body, inventing an interiority shaped by the species’ histories of domestication. Sculptures in the form of deer viscera are covered in a biomimetic glaze, inspired by the morphological similarities between the lining of the deer’s organs and aerial views of the nature reserve’s industrialized landscapes where milu now roam. Through ceramic sculptures, found fabric, and light placed in compositional tension, the exhibition traces feral relations that negotiate care and release, containment and transgression.

The exhibition is curated by Sharon X. Liu, Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow.

Yining Fei (Harbin, China, 1990. Lives and works in Shanghai, China) works across sculpture, moving image, and installation to form narratives that walk between the real and the fantastical. Drawing threads from the veins of literature, mythology, and science, Fei assembles alternative histories and speculative futures in which nature and technological infrastructure remain caught in unresolved entanglements. Fei’s select group exhibitions include Art Must Be Artificial: Perspectives of AI in the Visual Arts (Diriyah Art Futures, Riyadh, 2024), SCI-FI: Mythologies Transformed (Science Gallery Melbourne, Melbourne, 2024), National Gallery of Victoria Triennial (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2024), New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed (ArtScience Museum, Singapore，2023), Science Fiction and Hallucination (MAXXI Museum, Rome, 2022), Immaterial / Re-material: A Brief History of Computing Art (UCCA Beijing, Beijing, 2020) and Resistance of the Sleepers (UCCA Dune, Qinhuangdao, 2020). She received her bachelor’s degree from Fudan University, School of Journalism, and earned her MFA in Design and Technology from the Parsons School of Design, The New School.