Feral Sediment

Ferality is often used as a political tool to designate subversive forms of life that seek survival within, while testing the limits of, a given order. Yining Fei’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., Feral Sediment , centers on this condition of being neither wild nor tame through the case of the milu (Père David’s deer). Having lived in a state of semi-captivity in the Qing Imperial Hunting Ground for hundreds of years, milu suffered local extinction in the early 20th century in China, surviving as a species only because a small number had been transported to European zoos (and later, to an English duke’s estate). Their return to China, first as diplomatic gifts in the 1950s, made them the subject of an “innocent but laudable” repatriation story, as described by the UK Far Eastern Department, and a tale of “heroic homecoming,” as told by the Chinese state press.