SHUMI BOSE / KOOZ Thank you both for making time to talk, amid your overlapping travels and projects. At the time of writing, you have recently completed a ten-year review exhibition of your project Ripple Ripple Rippling at the Architectural Association in London, as well as mounting the ongoing exhibition How Much Wattage Is One Handbreadth of Water? at Storefront NYC — and you're back on the road to China.

JINGRU (CYAN) CHENG ‘How Much Wattage Is One Handbreadth’ at Storefront is part of a larger research project, Tracing Sand. The trigger point for that research was the Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore. We've been trying to take apart this iconic site, from the land it stands on to the glass panels that make up its famous dome. Our research over the past year is on the sand, starting from where Singapore imports sand to make its territory. That leads us to Vietnam, Cambodia and along the Mekong River, because the sand comes with the river all the way from the Himalayas. So we’ve been literally tracing the sand along that line all the way back to China — taking some meandering journeys along the way. We started with a very particular focus on land reclamation and sand in the built environment, which led us to water, to hydraulic energy and the dam. Somehow Tracing Sand becomes a line to trace geology and energy.

KOOZ This line feels like it's easier to trace than it was in your previous exhibition, Ripple Ripple Rippling. Perhaps because you start with a tangible matter – sand, you're able to locate the story in geography. Ripple is a less linear narrative to trace.

JCCThat's true. Ripple requires a lot of contextual explanation so that people know what's going on with China's urbanisation, its floating population — and then there's this whole long process of how and why we're doing it. There’s definitely a transition from Ripple to TracingSand. Yet although these two projects look very different, for us there are things that are consistent across them both. It's all around this notion of drifting bodies. Those bodies could be water, sand or people, like rural migrant workers. In Ripple Ripple Rippling, we follow rural migrant workers, to their home village, to landscapes of extraction, and to materials that come from those lands and supply urbanisation. Here the flow of people leads us to the flow of materials. It is the other way around in Tracing Sand. Following sand, we meet people along the sand supply chain across territories, such as families living on sand barges for decades in Thailand, and female pebble pickers in riverside sand mines in Laos. These drifting bodies are both the subjects of the research and the guides that lead us through the journey. To an extent, by following them, we are drifting along the way.

KOOZ What prompted you to start the Ripple project?

JCCI was doing my masters at the AA Projective Cities some twelve years ago, looking at rural migrant workers in cities — most of whom work in construction — as such an important labour force contributing to China's urbanisation. Already that work was trying to understand China's urbanisation beyond the image, beyond all this unprecedented growth. At one point, I was just looking at the numbers, almost 269 million workers as of 2013 (the number reached almost 300 million in 2024), and trying to make sense of that. London has almost 10 million people as of 2024; they are 300 million, all working in a city. Where are they from? What's their journey — and what happened to their family, to their land, to their village? That was the starting point of my PhD, looking at the rural end of this tremendous floating work force — because almost all the academic literature I could find was about the urban village, around living conditions in the city. What about the emptying out villages? That’s the curiosity that is shared with Tracing Sand — as in, trying to understand where things are from, where people are from, tracing back to recontextualise these drifting bodies. That's the motivation.

CHEN ZHAN For me, it's maybe a little bit more personal than it was for Cyan. I joined Ripple halfway through; Cyan had already been working on it for a few years.

My family has rural roots on my father's side; he’s from this super rural place, probably even more so than the village we work with in the Ripple project. My dad perfectly fits into the floating population pattern in search of a better life in urban China. However, during my childhood, I had never spent enough time with my grandparents in their rural home. I always have this curiosity, trying to understand where my family is from and how my family’s rural roots with the soil can ground my future practice as a person, beyond the label of my profession, whether as an architect, an anthropologist or a filmmaker.

Also, when I joined the Ripple project, I was in the process of changing my career. I had been working at Heatherwick Studio since graduation, making lots of shiny projects. But I wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. With the belief that clarity can only be found through doing, I went to study anthropology and started filmmaking. Ripple, at that moment, offered a great opportunity as well as an excuse to jump out from architecture, exploring how anthropological observation and filmic documentation can become my way to connect with this particular rural community in China as well as my family’s rural roots.

Moving on to Tracing Sand, it's also very personal in the sense that the departure point of the project starts from Changi Airport— and that’s the last project I worked on at Heatherwick Studio. At the time, I struggled hugely with this feeling of disconnection as an architect making a glossy international project, but never having met my colleagues on the other side of the globe, and with little knowledge about where the materials are from. The only thing that's certain is the render; you know the final space will look just like the model. I think the Tracing Sand project is really about what brought all this together, how the project became what it is, where the materials are from — and what this shiny project means to the land and rivers that give its materiality and all the labour involved in these processes.

KOOZ How do you feel wrapping up Ripple Ripple Rippling? Is anything ever really over?

CZI think it's more of a temporary pause. Our relationship with the villagers is still there. We keep in touch and they inform us what happens in the village. It might be good to revisit the project in five years or so, for example, to check out the new ring road in construction — the further expansion of Wuhan towards this more rural territory.

JCC When I started looking at the rural migrant workers ten years ago, Wuhan only had the third ring road; now we are looking at the sixth ring road. Actually, this new ring road is literally cutting across Shigushan village and its surrounding agricultural lands.

KOOZ The way that you spent time with these people will obviously remain with them for a long time; eventually you and your project will also be a story. It makes sense that along the spiral of things, you'll circle back and see what happened in the space between. How do you set about deciding when to follow and when to pause though; is it about a linear tracing, or is it more intuitive?

JCCExcellent question! I think for Ripple, the change of pace comes with my departure from an institutional framework. During the early years, I was doing my PhD by design. There's an imperative need to produce; we need distinct academic outputs, it’s very structured and objective-oriented. At a certain point in my post-doc, I struggled with that — similarly to Chen working on the airport project, I was at a breaking point. In chopping up my work for various objectives to fit into the framework set by funding bodies, it stopped making sense, to a point that I quit my job. So then Ripple took a completely different turn. That's also the moment we thought of collaborating with Mengfan Wang, the choreographer, and basically changing the rhythm of our work. I wanted to do the things that I didn't get to do under the institutional framework. We experimented with just spending time in the field, filming and having more fun.

KOOZ It's quite brave to introduce another medium like performance to the project. You don't really know how it's going to affect the project, or even to what extent it's going to be integrated.

JCC Yeah, it was a small rebellion; it also happened during the pandemic. I think people made upending decisions when the entire world was put on a halt, at least that's what happened to us. We also asked Mengfan why she joined us; especially now that we know her, we can see that the way we explained our project didn't make sense to her at all — it's not her language. We just had a deep intuition that there's something in the body, something that we know is there but we are unable to grasp — and we needed help. Mengfan doesn't care for the academic concerns that I had been addressing in my PhD; she cares deeply about the grannies in the village, the actual interaction with them, who they are, their lives. You’ve seen her sharing the encounters with the grannies in the village (at the Transversal Alliances symposium) and how she carried, metaphorically, these aging female bodies on her own, in a durational performance on Bedford Square. All these are down to opening herself up and connecting with people at an intuitive level. I find it beautiful and profound, and this new dimension brought in by her is transformative for the project and also for us. We are still in this process of understanding what we're all doing; in fact, making this reflective exhibition is probably the moment that it all comes together, finally.

KOOZ What seems common to me through these projects is really the courage to move on that intuition.

CZIt’s a way of practicing, but also a way of life. This reminds me of a Chinese filmmaker whose work we both really liked: Jia Zhangke. He recently released a feature film, Caught by the Tides (2024), which is an accumulation of twenty years of footage. Some shots are everyday documentation of life; others are part of his narrative films — he combined all the footage together and produced a new piece. It involved editing over 1000 hours of footage — but I find it quite a nice way of working, giving things time to wait, letting things ferment. After all that time, there is another story that emerges out of it.

KOOZ Tell us more about the Ripple exhibition at the Architectural Association (AA) in London.

JCC The exhibition at AA was a homecoming moment; after all, Ripple started there, over ten years ago. We definitely need to credit the AA and the whole team, particularly for the outdoor dry stone foundation. which was possible because the AA has direct access to the square’s public corner and a good relationship with the BedfordEstates. This condition prompted us to think about an outdoor installation, engaging with the public while making a connection between the Chinese village and the British context through dry stone walling.

CZWhen we talk about process, there is a process of research, but an exhibition is also a part of the process. The exhibition is not always about showing the end product; even though this was a ten-year review, it opened up new directions and created new relations. For instance, the dry stone foundation that we built on Bedford Square, we love it a lot. Through this material assemblage temporarily brought to the AA, we got to know dry stone wallers Tim Mason and Richard Gray from Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire, architects Laura Stargala and Timothée Ryan who only work with local stone materials, stonemasonry graduates from the Building Crafts College, and a team of students from various London-based schools who joined the dry stone house foundation as part of the installation and de-installation. This is indeed a case of rippling on its own.

KOOZ Tell us more about the exhibition at Storefront, and how that location pushed you. The title is less abstract, more of a direct question: how much wattage is one hand breadth of water?

JCCAt the Jewel, the lower levels of the waterfall are contained in a transparent tube, so you see it, but you cannot hear it or get wet because of it. It creates an illusion that you can touch the waterfall while the whole experience is alienatedSo that's one water pulse.

The other water pulse is floating with the rhythm of generating electricity in Thailand’s Vajiralongkorn Dam Reservoir. What we encountered there was the indigenous Karen Hill Tribe, who had been living in the forest. But the entire forest was submerged forty years ago, due to the dam construction. So they moved from the forest to a life of floating and living on rafts. In the reservoir, what we see now as islands are actually mountain tops. So every day, when the dam releases water to generate electricity, everything moves down by one hand-breadth.

The Jewel waterfall runs almost every day (apart from maintenance). Singapore gets its green energy through a transnational power grid, going through Laos, Thailand and Malaysia, to Singapore. That's how the two water pulses are connected, and that’s the link we’re trying to bring out in the exhibition.

CZWe hadn’t thought about making an exhibition about this field story yet‚ but we were prompted by Storefront’s spatial condition — its public front. The main idea was un-black-boxing. At first, we wanted to use the facade of Storefront itself, for a massive video projection of the Jewel waterfall, while going inside the gallery means entering through the ‘waterfall’ into the energy network that sustains this iconic image. But Storefront runs an ongoing public art commission on its façade, so the idea of un-black-boxing moved inside, which is the current design.

We divided the space into two rooms inside the gallery. In the middle, we have a huge projection of the running waterfall. When you walk through this soft projection screen to the back, you enter a dark room filled with a three-channel video installation that creates a sensorial experience of what floating on the raft might be like.

JCC We lived on the raft for a couple of days, the daily water level change was not really perceptible. But we learnt from the people who live there that when that one hand-breadth accumulates over a year, the result is level shifts of up to 20 meters in depth, which means a horizontal movement of 200 metres. The key idea, at least in the video parts of the exhibition, is to put these two water pulses in contrast, speaking to each other, collapsing the distance between the two.

CZThe other half of the exhibition space is more about the context of this journey. We devised a sound instrument to convey a sonic sensation. You can't easily visualise a transnational grid, but in our journey, we heard electricity. When you pass by the electricity towers deep in the mountains of Laos, you can hear a weird sound, like a hum — it’s just there, all the time. That's a bodily sensation of electricity; that's why we included this aluminium sound bar, to relay this. It’s another form of electricity; the equipment needs electricity to make the sound, and the sound is transduced through the vibration of an aluminium bar. Actually, aluminium is the main conductive material used for cables in high-voltage transmission lines.

JCC The sound of the electricity was always mixed with birds’ songs and winds; it was never pure mechanical sounds. We encountered those high voltage lines in deep mountains, in remote areas, almost as if they were part of nature. What you feel there is very surreal; you're embraced by nature in terms of the scenery, but all of it is completely technologically mediated in reality; this is a very human-made condition.

KOOZ Which brings me back to the displacement of people from the former forests, who are not living on rafts. Are they still in the locality of their indigenous forests — albeit on water rather than on land?

CZYes, some of them say that during the dry season, when the water gets low, they can still see the shapes of their old houses and structures covered in mud.

KOOZ That’s tragic. Or is it tragic? Am I romanticising — how have those communities responded?

JCC The ‘Karen’ elders told us, when they were living in the forest, their lifestyle was what is called slash-and-burn. It was nomadic, and they struggled to access water. Now the area is submerged. It's actually easier for some of them, because they have developed a whole lifestyle based on fishing. Some lament the loss of forest, definitely. But we also met middle-aged and younger people who were actually moving back to the area. It's not the typical victim narrative, let's say.

CZThis part is similar to the rippling stories in the Chinese village. Of course, they suffered a lot from the big changes to their landscape, but they also took the opportunity to move on. Many young people came back because now they can work — growing rubber plantations, for instance. We can be critical of plantations, but for them it offers a form of economic support.

KOOZ As you mentioned earlier, exhibition-making is an act of extending research; each time you're deepening and extending collaborations, finding new interlocutors. What do you think has opened up in the course of your Storefront exhibition?

JCC Sound is the new element that we introduced here. We met the sound artist Shuoxin Tan through Mengfan — the choreographer who collaborated with us on the Ripple project. Working with Shuoxin, we developed the soundscape of the exhibition. On one hand, we were attempting to introduce the reservoir experience, on the other hand we had the idea of an instrument. We told Shuoxin about our fascination with a little device called a transducer; she introduced to us this idea of live audio feedback. We immediately loved it. Shuoxin taught us the basic principles of acoustic feedback, and then we translated that into the spatial condition of Storefront. The instrument is quite sensitive to what surrounds it. Perhaps you can imagine what that’s like at Storefront NYC; during the install, a heavy truck passed by, and the instrument made a different sound. The instrument is really part of the space, it has a very responsive relationship.

KOOZ It is pure acoustic design, but such a beautiful way to work through it. The literal meaning of a transducer is something that transforms one form of energy to another — which describes your collaboration as well as what’s happening in your work, and also in your attempt to recreate an energy that you felt somewhere else. There’s something poetic about this synergy.

JCC You pick up on a really good point: that also applies to the sound composition for the three-channel video. That sound composition is done by Chen, but Shuoxin supplies certain principles and the material she makes using computer algorithms. The sound we had planned originally was using our field recordings, which sound quite raw: in the reservoir, you hear water, wind, all these natural sounds. During our discussion, Shuoxin pointed out that as the essential form of sound is a wave, so is the essential form for water; both form waves. She composes sound fragments, mainly in two ways: One approach is rather abstract, based on different numbers of sine-waves series, while on the other hand deconstructing our field recordings through a stochastic algorithm. We then combined these with our field recordings into a composition. These three layers together give us the sensation we're trying to capture: something in between nature and the technologically mediated. They’re always together, and this also applies to the sound composition.

CZWhat's nice about Shuoxin’s collaboration is that she has never been to those places. She looked at some of our footage from the fieldwork, but she couldn't relate as much — so she started to ask questions. Her practice is about how sound can trigger other imaginations and even create gaps, rather than just recreating something in reality — which is a quite beautiful way of thinking about it. It helped us to liberate our thinking from the site a little bit.

KOOZ What kind of questions was she asking? It sounds like it was not about the information or data from your recordings…

CZI guess she's interested in what sound triggers: the emotional space in your mind, and the psychological reactions to sound. There is a bit of a blind match to it, she didn't have the image of the reservoir, of floating water when she was making her tracks. I then connect these tracks with what I have in mind. I think that makes a new connection, which is quite surprising and fun.

JCC We acknowledge that we cannot recreate experience, but if we want to shape an encounter for our audience in New York, then what should be the trigger? That's the kind of question we were thinking about.

KOOZ It's so interesting that you talk about this transformation of energy, from sonic to emotional and back again. That sounds like a generative process of dialogue, with a fair bit of interpretation along the way. Is there an extended programme at Storefront as there was at the AA? That location has a unique relationship with the public; even when it is closed, there are always little leaks and drips… Another way of putting it would be, what practices are you hoping to reach?

JCC Storefront is devising joint programmes with various cultural, art and educational institutions. In late March, we will be in conversation with artist, filmmaker Sky Hopinka facilitated by Harvard GSD and hosted by the Dia Art Foundation in New York. In April, our Storefront exhibition will travel to the Graham Foundation in Chicago joining the Swamplands group show, then to Singapore and Thailand in autumn, to the very context where the field stories emerged.

A small thing we proposed, as we have this sound instrument, is for Storefront to invite other sound artists to interact with it, to activate its performative potential The stage is set and could be theirs if they want it — just like the dry stone foundation on Bedford Square in London.

CZThis connects to how I feel architecture should be; the end of one project should always be the beginning of something else, because you're creating a space for things to happen there. It’s the same for our projects as well as the exhibitions, what we are doing is about enabling new relationships, new ripples and surprise connections.

KOOZ That sounds like a neat place for us to stop. Thank you both, so much, for this meandering and rippling conversation.

Bios

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng works across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking. Her practice follows drifting bodies — from rural migrant workers to forms of water — to confront intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Cyan was awarded the Harvard GSD’s 2023 Wheelwright Prize for TRACING SAND and received two commendations from the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) President’s Awards for Research in 2020 and 2018. Cyan holds a PhD by Design from the Architectural Association and currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.

Chen Zhan is an architect, anthropologist, and independent filmmaker, trained at the Architectural Association and SOAS University of London. As a UK-registered architect, Chen has worked at Heatherwick Studio on high-profile projects since 2011, including the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Leeds, Changi Airport Terminal 5 in Singapore, Google Gradient Canopy in California and the Bund Finance Centre in Shanghai.

Cyan and Chen’s joint projects include Orchid, Bee and I, a fictional ethnography reflecting on personal and collective experiences of living through the climate crisis and the Covid pandemic, and Ripple Ripple Rippling, a transdisciplinary endeavour that tunes into how Chinese rural migrant workers make worlds. Their film work received the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival (2024) and the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival (2023) among others. Together they are Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 2024–2025 CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Researchers on field research as a land-dependent practice.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.