Cactus Press

This project, initiated by artist Wang Xue, explores Meshrep (or Maiwu), a form of contemporary Chinese square dance, through field research and archival study.
It includes two publications: The National Meshrep Square Dance Directory, a community-maintained guide listing dance groups and schedules nationwide, and The Meshrep Score, which traces the transformation of Meshrep from ritual to stage to public square using historical dance materials.
“All the dancer are one family” is a slogan often shared among Meshrep dancer friends, perhaps expresses people’s longing for connection and collective movement.
Cactus Press aims for these publications to act as a “sustainable dancing guide,” celebrating connection, friendship, and collective movement, while allowing Maiwu to continue generating new relationships and possibilities for shared dance.

Second edition of So Long, artist book from Yao Meng.
The illustrations are transcribed and assembled from take-out tickets generated in the artist’s daily life. The text in the note on the take-out ticket was disassembled from a speech given by Li Ta-chao at Peking University one hundred years ago (January 16, 1923), titled “Economic Organization under Socialism”. The text reached the artist in small quantities, many times, and indirectly through deliverymen with food during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the small tickets were printed using cheap thermal printing, they were mostly torn and faded. One hundred years is too long to wait.
The design of the book is a return to the effect of the magazines that were circulated among the youth groups during the May 4th revolution in China one hundred years ago.

We often speak of “love” and say “I love you,” yet if love is worth a thousand words, why do we still depend on language at all?

This project extends my engagement with archival materials and traditional photography, focusing on letters and images as two parallel languages of representation. While photographs appear precise and evidential, they can limit imagination; words, grounded in context yet open to interpretation, allow emotion to travel across time. Reading historical letters, I found a shared emotional vocabulary that shaped my photographic process.

Memory, like language, is unstable and shaped by imagination. Film photography and letter-reading both involve delay, translation, and temporal distance, where meaning is reconstructed rather than fixed. I am particularly drawn to errors and imperfections—whether in images or in language—as sites where expression exceeds clarity.

In an age of hyper-precise images, language becomes not merely a tool of description but a space of ambiguity, where what cannot be fully seen or said continues to resonate.