down down down jacket
SOLO, Bucharest, Romania
Xandu 1
Papier-mâché, watercolor, pencil, spray paint, fig, epoxy resin, jar lid, LED
2026
Xandu 2
Papier-mâché, watercolor, pencil, spray paint, orange, stainless steel, LED
2026
SOLO presents Wei Yang’s solo show down down down jacket. The title refers to a garment derived from the fine, soft plumage of geese, lightweight, insulating, enclosing warmth, suggesting both protection and intimacy, while also implying an ongoing extraction form and occupation of nature.
The title repeats down like a word that cannot stop choosing itself, each repetition being like a near-synonym that never quite escapes the form of the original. A jacket down as feather, down as descent, down as lowering, down as temperature. The word doesn’t move forward.
When I see a feather in the wind, every movement already feels like a rehearsal for landing, even when there is no ground in sight.
down
down
down
Roland Barthes comes back to my mind, his idea that fashion is not really about objects but about language. A jacket is never just a jacket, it is already a sentence. To wear is therefore to be read, and to be read is already to be translated.
Alongside down down down jacket, Solo will also present Zishi Han and Wei Yang’s collaborative video-work Hairpin Beneath: The Stone of Three Lives (2025), its title suggesting the gesture of a man removing his ceremonial headgear and putting a woman’s hairpin. Han and Yang start from their translation of the late Ming dynasty ahnthology of homoerotic stories 弁而釵 (Biàn ér chai) by the pseudonymous The Moon-Heart Master of the Drunken West Lake.
Their video-work reimagines translated excerpts from 情贞纪 (Qingzhen ji, or A Story of Faithful Love), one of the homoerotic love stories from the late Ming dynasty anthology 弁而釵 (Biàn ér chāi, ca. 1628–44). The story tells of an academician, destabilized by his attachment to a student, disguises himself as one of his colleagues. This could also be seen as a scene of reading and misreading, where identity is reorganized and translated through substitution and replacement. Translation not as a step, but as the atmosphere everything happens in.
Wei Yang was inspired by Literati painting where the aim was not to depict nature realistically, but to satisfy the heart. Emotions in drag, interiority learning to pass as mountain, river, mist. A similar logic unfolds in Danmei literature and aesthetics, another interest of the artist, circulating within funü (腐女)reading groups of girls, where intimacy is structured not through realism but through affective intensity, delay, excess, and drama. Here, desire does not resolve into narrative closure, but sustains itself through intense feelings.
In the video work, I see this being acted out, suggested, ingrained, being less a dialogue than a structure of translation. Two figures speak, like in a reality show, but speech seems to pass through them. Their discursive roles never fully stabilise, just words passing through bodies. So what happens is not dialogue, but a language that moves by slipping into dramatic exits. The same logic extends into the sculptural and material field of the works: nothing resolves into objecthood, everything remains slightly in translation. And maybe this is where I understand it best, intimacy that the artist is looking for is more of a cadence, an ongoing sensual modulation of proximity and withdrawal, of words, songs, objects, sculptures,, fragments of landscape. In down down down jacket, Wei Yang constructs an atmosphere in which this logic itself becomes material, where the atmosphere appears like a familiar spell: you will be held, you will be warmed, you will land safely.
text by Daniela Custrin