The Cotton Candy Back Then

Exhibition / Multimedia Installation / Site-specific Machine Performance, 2025

"This is a story about Cottoneltia—the taste of childhood is often soft, light, and sweet—like cotton candy, floating at the edges of our consciousness. Yet in an era where technology and automation are gradually replacing manual labor, the sensory memories once co-created by humans and machines are quietly undergoing a process of alienation, much like summer's melting cotton candy—ambiguous, sticky, and unsettling.

This is a site-specific art project that began in an abandoned sugar factory in Zhangzhou, where the performance is executed by the symbolic flying mechanism of “flying cotton candy.” It serves as a vessel of emotion and a metaphor for disappearance. The final installation combines video, objects, and floating cotton candy to construct a suspended space. Past and present, vision and taste, new and old technologies—they melt here, leaving behind the scent of cotton candy, drifting toward the future."

- WANG Yi