Migration Distribution

Migration Distribution 2023

Photo by Luan gallery

Dispersed Migration

The migration of Asian elephants is not merely an ecological occurrence. It is a geographical and political intervention—an event that traverses not only physical landscapes, but also histories, state borders, and systems of control.

In this archival exhibition, artists Yvette Yang and Yifan Jing undertake an embedded field investigation, closely following a herd of wild Asian elephants migrating south from Yunnan. Rather than observing from a safe anthropocentric distance, they choose to move alongside—tracing the ground shaped by elephant footsteps, searching for residual memories in crushed vegetation, burned-out shelters, and temporary ruins.

Zorg renders moments of the elephants' movement across farmland, cities, and national borders in pencil drawings—quiet but insistent marks, echoing the slowness and weight of migration. Yang responds with cyanotypes, mapping the plant species found where the herd briefly rested, creating layered imprints of soil, flora, and temporal presence. Together with audio fragments of elephant calls, burnt stoves, broken fences, and satellite-tracked trajectories, these works construct a political geography shaped by non-human agency.

The exhibition weaves together drawing, cyanotype, satellite imagery, and field documentation to investigate how elephants—under the pressures of modern state governance, habitat fragmentation, and capitalist extraction—become involuntary agents of mobility. Their movements reflect not only a search for survival, but also the displacements, ruptures, and control mechanisms embedded in the human world.

This is an exhibition about movement, but not solely animal movement. It prompts us to ask: When an elephant crosses a national border, does it not enact a geopolitical gesture? When a wild plant is intercepted at a customs checkpoint, are we not also witnessing a migration narrative denied? And in this planetary moment of ecological volatility, where do we—humans—situate ourselves within the shrinking terrains of habitation?

Dispersed Migration is not about elephants per se. It is about how we might reimagine our relationships—with the non-human, with territory, and with the very idea of belonging. Through their research in the borderlands of southwest China, the artists encountered villages displaced by elephant movement, fields re-zoned, emergency shelters deployed, and satellite systems used to render elephants as visualised, trackable “subjects.” In doing so, they reveal the underlying ecological governance and surveillance politics that shape both the elephants’ journeys and our own.

To walk these routes is not to romanticise migration—it is to confront its asymmetries, its violence, and its interspecies entanglements. It is to ask who controls mobility, and whose footprints are allowed to remain.