Cheng Xinhao Travels Yunnan’s Lost Roads

There are roads that no longer exist on maps yet continue to survive in the memory of places. The new exhibition by Cheng Xinhao emerges from this intersection of travel, history, and landscape, tracing three journeys across Yunnan shaped by colonialism, war, and modernity. One of the exhibition’s central figures is Augustus Raymond Margary, the British interpreter who, in 1874, attempted to open new trade routes between China and Burma before being killed during the expedition. Decades later, a young Naxi student leaves Lijiang for Beijing, experiencing the radical transformation brought by the railway: time no longer follows the sunrise or the crowing of roosters, but the schedules of trains. The third journey belongs to Cheng Xinhao himself who, in 2023, walked these historic routes toward Burma, spending more than a year crossing landscapes shaped by rain, injury, and long stretches of solitude. Through videos, texts, and images, the artist transforms the landscape into a living archive where personal stories and major historical shifts continue to overlap. More than a documentary exhibition, the project becomes a poetic reflection on movement, memory, and the way the past continues to resurface along the roads of the present.