Water Technologies as Community: Rafts, Beacons, and Littoral Narratives

Water Technologies as Community: Rafts, Beacons, and Littoral Narratives is a research-based project developed by curator Jiyuan SUN with artists Qizheng GAI and Zeyuan REN, as part of Confluence: Memories of Water and Future Narratives, a group exhibition in Macau supported by the Macao Cultural Development Fund. Through two newly commissioned investigations centered on the raft and the beacon, the project explores how water-based technologies function not only as tools, but as spatial and social structures that organize movement, shelter, navigation, labor, and collective memory.

Water Technologies as Community: Rafts, Beacons, and Littoral Narratives is a research-based project developed by curator Jiyuan SUN with artists Qizheng GAI and Zeyuan REN, as part of Confluence: Memories of Water and Future Narratives, a group exhibition in Macau supported by the Macao Cultural Development Fund. Through two newly commissioned investigations centered on the raft and the beacon, the project explores how water-based technologies function not only as tools, but as spatial and social structures that organize movement, shelter, navigation, labor, and collective memory.

Taking Macau as a port city shaped by maritime exchange and layered relations between land and water, the project extends to Shunde and Guangzhou through post-opening public sharing sessions. By connecting archival research, artistic production, exhibition-making, and public programs, it approaches technology as a community-making process embedded in water, space, and regional exchange across the Greater Bay Area.

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2026
Grantee: Jiyuan Sun, Qizheng Gai, Zeyuan Ren

Jiyuan SUN 

SUN Jiyuan (b. 1997) is a curator and artist. His research and practice trace associations often overlooked by established systems of knowledge and institutional narratives, exploring how different worlds of experience intersect and collide. For him, knowledge emerges not from the boundaries of existing disciplines, but from the correspondences that arise between them. Working across image-making, sound, archival research, and curatorial practice, he investigates how technology, ecology, and relations of power shape perception. His recent research focuses on textile industrial history, maritime Asia, and energy transition. In 2026, he was selected for Shanghai Sound II: Industry and Production, a Cultural Researcher programme at the West Bund Museum, Shanghai, supported by CHANEL.

Qizheng GAI

Qizheng GAI (b. 2001, Shandong) currently lives and works in Beijing. He received his BA and MA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is the co-founder of TTTB Artist-Run Space. His practice focuses on the deviations that emerge through movement. Emphasising temporariness and site-responsiveness, he often constructs mobile media or game-based mechanisms to activate informal traces and marginal situations. His work takes the form of temporary public art, moving image, tabletop games, and self-published materials. In 2024, he was selected for Drifting Lands: He Interaction Artist-in-Residency, supported by the He Art Foundation, and presented the solo exhibition Temporary Raft Workshop in Shunde, Guangdong. His work has also been exhibited at Moganshan Museum of Art, the CAFA Art Museum, and Guan Shanyue Art Museum.

Zeyuan REN

REN Zeyuan (b. 1997, Ningbo), currently lives and works in Hangzhou. He holds an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design. Spanning lens-based media, installation and performance, his practice is rooted in the composite experiences of displacement between coasts, ruminating on liminality in the context of historical and geographic specificity. His recent research concerns the imaginary lines charted by the West in the waters of the Yangtze River estuary during the 19th century, and the concrete representations of imperial optics. Ren’s works have been exhibited and screened at venues including Fotografiska Shanghai, Guangdong Times Museum, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, de Young Museum and Microscope Gallery. He was the finalist of the Three Shadows Photography Award and the UCCA Lab X Perrier Emerging Artist Program.