Smoke as Facade, Liminality and Threshold

Kerosene lamp, Kerosene oil, Lighter, Wooden Stool, 3 x white stretched canvas

Performed 3 times

Y.D.P Project Space

London. UK

2026

Commissioned by Y.D.P Project for Crossings, Chapter 2 of Living, Rehearsing…,

In the courtyard of Y.D.P Project Space, a wooden stool is placed, on it is a kerosene lamp, be side it, kerosene oil, a lighter. The artist, enters whilst holding a canvas. The lamp is lit. A small flame appears, ordinary and domestic. Then the smoke begins.

The action is simple and repeated. KIMVI holds a white canvas above the flame. Smoke rises, curls, and deposits carbon onto the surface. This is fumage—mark-making through smoke. But the artist does not control the outcome. The courtyard is open to the weather. Wind shifts the plume. Rain falls. Winter light flattens or reveals the emerging marks. The smoke lands where it lands. The canvas records an encounter rather than a design. This is done three times. Each performance is a separate crossing. Each canvas is different. The first may be touched by a gust; the second by drizzle; the third by a change in light. The artist’s body adjusts, waits, responds. The work is not only in the finished object but in the interval between flame and surface, between intention and chance.

The courtyard becomes a liminal space—a threshold. It is neither fully inside nor fully outside, neither private nor public, a passage between street and gallery. Here, smoke functions as facade: visible, apparently solid, yet always dissolving. It obscures and reveals. It leaves only traces. The white canvas is a membrane where this passing is momentarily held.

Performed three times across Crossings, the piece participates in the event’s continuous flow. It emerges, intensifies, fades, and hands over to what comes next. Audiences may encounter it as a pause, a crossing, a moment of attention within movement. The work speaks to transition, diaspora, and the condition of being between states—not resolved, not fixed, but held at the threshold.

The three canvases remain as documents. They are not pictures of smoke but records of its disappearance.

Photography by Anne Tetziaff , Christopher Peabody & Nicki Conn

Event: Crossings — Chapter 2 of Living, Rehearsing…
Guest Curator: Mengting Zhuo
Y.D.P Curators: Erin Li and Billy Tang
Artistic Director: Billy Tang
Head of Operations: Eleanor Dobson
Performance Assistant: Carmen Cortizas
Founder and Director: Yan Du