05/06/2026
✨ LAST TWO WEEKS — Cheng Xinhao’s solo exhibition, “And We Shall Go Through Their Hills Without Much Delay”, is currently on view at Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing, until 20 June 2026.
This exhibition centers on three journeys of arrival and departure in Yunnan.
In 1874, the British interpreter Augustus Raymond Margary travelled into Yunnan along historic courier routes, seeking to open a trade corridor into Southwest China that would support British colonial expansion. In 1937, a young Naxi scholar known as “Snow Mountain” left Lijiang via the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway, encountering through the train a new experience of time, distance, and modernity. That same year, construction of the Burma Road began extending westward through Yunnan, reshaping the region’s connections with Southeast Asia.
A century and a half later, Cheng Xinhao retraced these routes on foot, walking from Kunming towards Myanmar. Over the course of eighteen months marked by accidents, injury, recovery, and the changing cycles of dry and rainy seasons, he found himself returning to a persistent question: Is arriving at a destination also a way of arriving at the past? Can the body re-enter history through movement, allowing relationships long buried beneath newer layers of infrastructure and narrative to emerge once again?
📍 Cheng Xinhao: And We Shall Go Through Their Hills Without Much Delay
📅 9 May – 20 June 2026
📍 Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing
