Image: Yining Fei, Feral Sediment, 2026, studio image. Courtesy the artist
SculptureCenter will present Yining Fei’s ‘Feral Sediment’ from September 19 through December 28, 2026, in Long Island City, New York, curated by Sharon X. Liu, Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow. It is one of three new solo exhibitions opening as part of the institution’s fall programme, alongside presentations by Aziz Hazara and Cevdet Erek.
The exhibition centres on the milu, a rare deer native to China whose survival, SculptureCenter says, has been mediated by captivity, diplomacy and modern infrastructure. It began with Fei’s observation of morphological similarities between the lining of the animal’s digestive organs and aerial views of industrialised landscapes — a coincidence the institution frames as an inquiry into what separates wildness from domestication.
For centuries most milu lived in semi-captivity inside the Qing Imperial Hunting Ground. After a flood breached the imperial walls in 1894 they were hunted close to extinction, surviving as a species only because animals had been transported to European zoos and later to an English duke’s estate. Reintroduced to China first as diplomatic gifts and then through scientific breeding in the 1980s, the milu now number in the thousands but have no unmediated wilderness to return to: they rest among wind farm towers, cross paved roads and wander into farmland.
Fei constructs the deer’s interior organs in ceramic viscera as a cosmos in miniature, where the biological and the artificial, the intimate and the planetary converge. A glazed heart rotates like a trotting horse lantern (zou ma deng), casting the silhouette of a deer in recursive gallop. SculptureCenter describes the deer’s body as a medium in which multiple histories, the present and speculative futures are digested into the same matter.
The exhibition opens with a reception on Saturday, September 19, from 2 to 4 p.m. at SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, NY 11101, shared with ‘Aziz Hazara: Coming Home’ and ‘Cevdet Erek: Americas’, both also on view through December 28. The three are presented as separate solo exhibitions within the fall 2026 programme rather than as a group show.
Fei was born in Harbin, China, in 1990 and lives and works in Shanghai, working across sculpture, moving image and installation. Her group exhibitions include ‘Art Must Be Artificial’ at Diriyah Art Futures, Riyadh (2024), the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial (2024), ‘Science Fiction and Hallucination’ at MAXXI, Rome (2022) and ‘Immaterial / Re-material’ at UCCA Beijing (2020). She holds a bachelor’s degree from Fudan University’s School of Journalism and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. Support for the exhibition is provided by Ally Yanxiu Luo.
SculptureCenter is closed for installation until September 19, when it resumes regular hours of Thursday through Monday, noon to 6 p.m. ‘Feral Sediment’ remains on view through December 28, 2026.
