Roots of Roots, curated by Chang Wang and Moyu Yang at FILET, East London, invites viewers into a nuanced landscape of quiet sedimentations where memory, identity, and transformation intertwine. The exhibition unfolds with subtlety and care, reflecting FILET’s ethos as a site for experimental, process-driven art. Founded by Rut Blees Luxemburg and Uta Kögelsberger, FILET’s minimalist space—with its raw concrete floors and white walls—provides a textured yet neutral canvas, enabling the artworks’ gentle material presence and layered meanings to quietly take root.

At Roots of Roots, the gallery becomes a living container for an ongoing poetic inquiry. Soft daylight filters through translucent fabric, casting a delicate glow on installations that merge the botanical with the synthetic, the natural with the crafted. An earthy floor installation composed of soil, twigs, and fragile wrapping evokes cycles of growth, decay, and renewal, reflecting the exhibition’s meditation on time and transformation. Handwritten texts and ritual-like objects hang suspended, fragments of language and culture caught mid-air, inviting contemplative encounters with personal and collective histories.

The exhibition opens with Siyuan Meng’s Undone, a site-specific performance in FILET’s window space. Meng’s tactile engagement with rice paper, water, and salt—a slow, meditative act of tearing, dissolving, and crystallizing—leaves subtle traces that transform the space. As the rice paper curtain is parted, the boundary between inside and outside dissolves, inviting light and the gaze of passersby into the exhibition. Christopher Rodriguez’s live extended soundscape—rich with cyclical harmonies and environmental recordings—imbues the performance’s fragility and immediacy with ritualistic presence, embodying the exhibition’s core themes of slowness and emergence. Undone thus becomes both the opening act and a tangible embodiment of the show’s perceptual heart: vulnerability, silence, and the beauty of slow becoming. 

Throughout the exhibition, each artist’s contribution acts as a fragment in a larger tapestry addressing memory, materiality, and identity. Maria Gomes’s As Três Marias greets visitors on the first wall like a reweaving of myth. Her wood reliefs and paintings summon the spirits of three radical feminists—Velho da Costa, Horta, and Barreno—whose 1970s New Portuguese Letters defied patriarchal censorship. Gomes’s ghostly figures transform “home” into a complex ecological layering of emotion and history, materialized through the aged texture of wood. 

Yihao Zhang’s Unlanded uses driftwood and fibers to evoke the precarious identity of migrants caught between rootlessness and the longing for belonging. The driftwood symbolizes uprooted bodies, while the extending fibers represent tendrils of searching and regeneration, capturing the nonlinear, ongoing process of identity remaking in a globalized context.

Georgia Salmond’s Ivy (2024) presents six small resin casts of densely tangled vines, referencing an oak tree once overtaken by them. Layered strands create partial and uneasy depths—spaces that are internal yet exposed, fibrous yet fragile. Drawing on Milton’s Paradise Lost, the work evokes a dark, entangled femininity. Like Eve’s fateful curiosity, each cast becomes a sign—language formed not from clarity, but from layered surfaces and shadowed recesses.

Positioned quietly beside Salmond’s casts, in a tucked-away corner of the gallery, Yiwen Ma’s Flowing Naturally(2025) offers a softer meditation on human-plant entanglements. Using materials often discarded—onion skins, strawberry tops—combined with silk and cotton, Ma transforms overlooked remnants into active participants rather than passive matter. Some elements are consumed during the making process, blurring the boundary between body and material. Her work resists the divide between human and more-than-human, proposing instead an intimate, reciprocal relationship through soft, living materiality.

In the corner of the room, Gabriel Kidd’s Sheep? explores identity through a fragile, liminal state. Inspired by medieval anchorites, the hand-stitched latex and wool form hovers between human, animal, and landscape—neither fully alive nor entirely symbolic. This tension evokes themes of isolation, transformation, and stillness. Nearby, “Two Unicorns Watching Their Friend Drown“ reimagines the unicorn as vulnerable and flawed. Kidd’s pointillist drawing invites close attention, revealing a queer icon shaped by shame and tenderness rather than purity or pride.

Sarah Fortais’ Lark assembles discarded animal bones, soil, and jackfruit into a stellated dodecahedron, a geometric form that carries a layered narrative of life and consumption in London. The bones, marked by butchery and sediment, link past and present, creating a temporal dialogue with the city’s history. Fortais’ intention to return the piece to the Thames creates a cyclical connection between art, place, and time, highlighting transformation as an ongoing process.

Chen Yang’s To Root and Bloom is an intimate clay sculpture embedded with soil, plant fibers, and human hair, resonating with themes of memory, decay, and resilience. Placed low to the ground and bathed in natural light, the work invites tactile engagement and reflection on human and natural cycles, blurring boundaries between presence and absence.

Her installation sits beside Jingtang Wang’s Bite Marks, in which a birch trunk embossed with human dental impressions merges fine art with biological sciences. This poetic installation probes the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature, questioning how shaping the environment parallels efforts to reshape ourselves. The birch bark’s “eye-like” surface witnesses this interplay of bodily and ecological adaptation. All three works are grounded directly on the floor, anchoring the exhibition in a material dialogue with the earth and inviting a slowed, bodily engagement with cycles of transformation and decay.

Zhuoqi Liu’s Make Me Bloom (2025) continues this conversation through a minimalist installation driven not by concept, but by pure sensation. Born from an all-encompassing exploration of material and deconstruction, the structure draws entirely on the inherent qualities of a single substance. A still flower radiates quiet purity, while a puffing, responsive reaction,activated through viewer interaction which evokes a sense of healing, as if blooming gently into fullness. The work offers not a statement, butan emotional field where presence, transformation, and softness coalesce.

On the opposite wall,Qingran Liu’s Linkage 1 uses knitted distortions of a fragmented family dinner photo to explore the fragility of familial bonds and the emotional residue of inheritance. The hazy imagery and act of knitting become metaphors for the looping transmission of generational memory—intimate yet uncertain, remembered yet forgotten. Nearby, Anqi Lin’s The Fog Shadows Another World Before Their Eyes blends polyester resin, fabric, and wood to embody time as a vibrating, tangible presence. The work evokes liminal spaces where intimacy, memory, and survival intersect, inviting viewers into a haunting yet familiar atmosphere that dissolves boundaries between subjective and objective realities. 

Weihang Zhu’s Memory Stone arises from deep psychological pain and existential reflection. The work stands as a monument to spiritual alienation and numb endurance, offering a space for contemplation and identity reconstruction through suffering. It honors resilience amid internal struggle, holding a quiet yet powerful presence. Her work is next to Xinyi Liu’s photographic series Elegy confronts cultural silence around death in Chinese society by turning to nature’s cycles. Drawing on traditional poetry and visual motifs, her images of fading flowers, dusk, and rainfall evoke grief and acceptance. Mounted on silver plates and framed like classical scrolls, the work blends cultural memory with personal reflection, inviting a peaceful reckoning with impermanence.

In dialogue with these works, Kuangyi Lu’s Eidolon reimagines memory through resin, 3D painting, wool, and AI-generated imagery. By reprocessing original photographs with artificial intelligence, Lu explores the dissonance between real and idealized memories, dwelling in the space where reality meets illusion and questioning memory’s reliability in a digital era.

Paweł Tajer’s installation Who Hasn’t Touched the Ground Even Once Can Never Be in Heaven combines dry point prints on fragile washi paper with a bronze root sculpture set on soil. Inspired by Polish romantic poetry, it evokes spiritual limbo and resilience. A detached sunflower sculpture reaches upward, symbolizing the tension between strength and vulnerability, inviting reflection on hope amid adversity.

Anyi Ji’s ceramic Water Born of Fire meditates on Chinese philosophy and landscape painting through the Five Elements—fire, water, wood, earth, and metal. The work embodies cycles of destruction and creation, life and death, inviting contemplation of nature’s eternal rhythms and human mortality.

London-based poet Yuying Song’s interdisciplinary piece Zoning Out in a Theatre weaves poetry, and installation to explore identity, love, and myth through a fluid, non-binary lens. Song reimagines mythology and spirituality, embracing chaos as creative force. Her upcoming collection Turbulence and Nerve Endings continues this exploration of personal and universal narratives. Xiang Li’s Resonance Frequency creates sensory compositions from crystals, wood, stone, dried plants, and scent, reconnecting body and earth through subtle vibrations. Her work is a guided meditation on touch, breath, and unseen connections that bind self and environment, revealing memory beyond language in a multisensory experience.

Rather than making bold statements, Roots of Roots unfolds slowly. The exhibition invites viewers to pause, to look closely, and to feel their way through a space where the boundary between nature and artifice blurs. In this context, FILET is not merely a gallery—it becomes a porous, living container in which ideas, forms, and meanings quietly take root.

Exhibition Artists: Georgia Salmond,Yihao Zhang, Maria Gomes, Siyuan Meng, Xiang Li ,Gabriel Kidd,Sarah Fortais,Pawet Tajer ,Xinyi Liu,Jingtang Wang,Yuying Song, Anyi Ji, Zhuoqi Liu , Kuangyi Lu, Weihang Zhu ,

Qingran Liu, Yiwen Ma,Angi Lin, Yang Chen, Fruzsina Nagy, Christopher Rodriguez

Photographers: Gehena Ye, Yihan Pan

Words by Tom Oakley

Top image credit:

Courtesy of the artists and Filet Space. Photography: Gehena Ye