Since 2016, Yujia has made several visits to Xinjiang and completed a series of moving image works on related themes. From the very first Black Ocean (2016) to the later The Pale View of Hills (2018), to the recent Treasure Hunt (2021) and The Silence of Hands (2021), Yujia always turns her camera to the people, events and landscapes that have been away from the spotlight. In the intertwining and sedate collision between history and reality, under the switching between the epic long shot and the modest documentary lenses, she wrote down a travelogue of the voyage to the Northwest with her distinctive aesthetic style through the composed and poetic image language. This is not a humanistic intoning, nor a naturalistic imagination; what she is truly concerned about is how human desire, historical desire and ideological desire infiltrate into this land and the original existential structure of it.

Liu Yujia invited Li Dan, Ma Hailun and Ye Wuji to participate in the exhibition. Through different media such as moving images, photography and installation, they present a collection of observation, documentation and thinking about Xinjiang and Central Asia from various perspectives. The exhibition brims with their emotional attachment to this region, witnesses the connection between them and the characters in their works and demonstrates the friendship of these four artists. “Infiltrate Slowly”, the title of this exhibition, derives from Li Dan’s work of the same name; here, it functions as a metaphor for sentiment and will. It is this kind of sentiment and will that impels them to visit this “sacred land” constantly and recurrently and also forms as the driving forces of their artistic practice.