zimufang                                                                   


                                   

The Field Guide to No Place  2026
Etching,Mezzotint, chine-collé, kozo paper, papier-mâché, wood
Variable dimensions




The Field Guide to No Place borrows the familiar structure of a field guide while quietly undoing its purpose. Traditionally, a field guide promises orientation: it names, classifies, and helps us distinguish one place from another. This guide offers no such certainty. Instead, it gathers landscapes that remain suspended between memory, imagination, and material experience and places that feel recognisable without belonging to any single geography.


Rather than presenting uncertainty as a temporary stage before clarity, the work asks what becomes possible when uncertainty is allowed to remain. The landscapes are assembled through the slow, iterative processes of printmaking, where each impression, transfer, and material intervention subtly transforms the image. Meaning is not predetermined, but gradually unfolds through negotiation with the material, allowing the work to resist settling into a final or fixed form.



The title “No Place” does not describe the absence of place, but the refusal of a singular one. These landscapes exist beyond exact coordinates. They cannot be fully mapped, identified, or possessed, yet they remain emotionally and materially real. The work proposes that not every place needs to arrive at certainty, and that perhaps a field guide can offer something other than direction: permission to dwell within what remains open.

                                            





The Field Guide adopts the language of field observation while gradually undoing its purpose. What begins as an attempt to locate, measure, and verify a place slowly becomes something else. As reference points disappear and observations remain unresolved, the guide abandons the expectation that orientation must eventually be restored. Rather than finding a way out of being lost, it comes to accept remaining within it, suggesting that not every landscape asks to be fixed before it can be inhabited.



















For me, 

Being lost isn’t really 

about not knowing where you are. 




It’s about letting go of the need 

to know exactly where you are.