After leaving Wuhan for Chengdu, I became aware for the first time of a connection between myself and rivers that was difficult to define – a slow, persistent sense of water's absence. Years later, when I arrived in London, the tides of the Thames brought me back into the realm of water, awakening memories of the Yangtze, of floods and of the rhythms of the rivers of my childhood. It was this physical experience across three cities that made rivers, for me, a way of understanding the world.
– Promise
This physical relationship with water underpins much of Promise's practice, which centres on a peripatetic approach to perceiving the world and pays particular attention to the two rivers that have shaped the artist's life: the Thames and the Yangtze.
Multiple Displacement (2025) investigates how geographical space and history overlap along the River Thames. The installation consists of two parts: a river painting and a performance video. In the latter, the artist moves along the banks of the Thames from Old Nelson Dock to Surrey Docks, repeatedly dragging a canvas across rocks and through water, allowing the river itself to generate the painting. This process is visible in the texture of the canvas: partially torn and scored by marks left by the rocks, with tones ranging from orange and red to green, grey and black.
The painting is displayed with the video projected directly onto its surface, accompanied by fragments of bricks collected near the river. The artist describes the result as material wetness: the surfaces bear the traces of water's actions, even though no water is physically present in the work. We are confronted with dry objects, yet we perceive within them the force of flooding, erosion and submersion.
The work developed from an earlier performance, Multiple Displacement (2024), in which the artist spent more than six hours moving pieces of wood washed ashore along the riverbank, continually repositioning them through movements governed by the rhythm of the river's tides. In the later work, this gesture is extended and the river's traces are imprinted directly onto the canvas, retaining the connection between heaven (天), earth (地) and humanity (人), the fundamental triad of Chinese Taoist thought.
Rivers shape not only the geography of a city but also the coordinates of lived experience. Historically, they have been sites where colonial cartography, engineering and state power converged, transforming natural water systems into instruments of control and, paradoxically, of safety. The same infrastructure designed to manage flooding and secure water supplies has also long operated as a mechanism of surveillance, extraction and the definition of boundaries.
Exposed directly to the force of the current, the artist investigates how individuals drift and continually redraw their trajectories within broader historical narratives still marked by the legacies of (neo)colonial power, which produce displacement and diasporic experience as their direct consequences. The fluidity of water thus becomes a way of thinking about boundaries – national, historical, natural and personal – as inherently unstable and perpetually subject to erosion and redefinition.
Promise (b. 2002, Wuhan) lives and works in London and holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. Their artistic practice spans photography, moving image, installation and field research, and is grounded in walking as a primary mode of perception.
Drawing on their personal connection with water, their work explores rivers, tidal islands and hydraulic sites, among other environments. It investigates how natural landscapes are shaped by human systems of measurement, control and infrastructure, tracing the moments when these impositions fail, fracture or give rise to unexpected forms of connection.
Text by Mirta Gianocca