Dongbay (Yübo Xü) is an artist and eco-warrior based between Beijing and Shanghai. Born in the Northeast of China and shaped by a nomadic upbringing, his practice explores humanity’s fading connection to nature amid accelerating industrial and digital transformation. Through installations, films, and writing, he combines organic materials with urban detritus, developing concepts such as primitive futurism and ritual minimalism to examine how ecological wisdom can be reimagined in the Anthropocene.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I was born in an industrial town in Northeast China, a place where wetlands, oil rigs, and machinery existed in the same breath. My family moved frequently, shaping my relationship with land as something fluid rather than fixed. This nomadic rhythm became the foundation of my artistic practice.

My path into art did not begin with theory; it began with daily life. I grew up observing the streets, the people, and the shifting landscapes around me, and I started creating simply out of an instinct to respond to what I saw. Graffiti, drawing, and small interventions in public space were my earliest forms of expression, long before I had the language to describe why I was making them.

Over time, these intuitive practices became a doorway into deeper questions. The environments I moved through, industrial relics, expanding cities, and later, remote regions during fieldwork, made me aware of how quickly our connection to land and non-human life was disappearing. What began as a personal habit of looking gradually evolved into a more serious inquiry into ecology, belief, and the emotional cost of modernization.

Today, my installations, films, and field-based projects continue to grow out of this mixture of lived experience, street-level observation, and long-term research into how humans navigate the Anthropocene.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

My work revolves around two guiding concepts: primitive futurism and ritual minimalism.

Primitive futurism imagines a world where ancient intuition and modern systems coexist, where mythology and technology are not opposites but parallel forms of ecological memory. Ritual minimalism strips away excess narrative to restore a sense of spiritual density in contemporary art.

More broadly, I examine themes of ecological rupture, industrial debris, spiritual displacement, material reincarnation, and the fading ability of humans to perceive the non-human world. My installations become a space where the synthetic and the organic collide, forcing us to rethink coexistence in an era of crisis.

How do your personal experiences and identity influence your art?

My identity is shaped by migration, industrial landscapes, and long-term fieldwork in different ecological communities. Growing up in rapidly changing oil towns taught me that land is alive, which is volatile, resilient, and wounded.

This background makes me sensitive to environments where the connection between land and life is disappearing. I spend extended periods living in remote or peripheral regions, learning from people whose ecological wisdom still survives modernization. These lived experiences, not documentation, become the emotional and structural logic of my work.

Rather than positioning myself above the material, I approach creation as a collaboration with land, memory, and the overlooked. The “eco-warrior” aspect of my identity is not a statement but a responsibility I carry into the work.

Are there any specific materials you prefer working with in your installation work? Why?

I often work with recycled industrial waste, like steel cables, electrical wires, skateboard trucks, and recycled organic remnants such as animal hides, bones, and human hair.

These materials are embedded with stories of exploitation, abandonment, and resilience. Industrial debris carries the imprint of overproduction; animal hides salvaged from poaching reflect ecological violence; human hair connects the work back to the body.

By weaving these fragments together, I create hybrid structures, part creature, part relic, that embody both decay and rebirth. Using what has been discarded allows the work to become a form of alchemy, transforming residues of destruction into carriers of new meaning.

Can you describe a recent project or artwork that you are particularly proud of?

A recent project I am developing is Goddess Who Sells Time, an installation shaped by my field research in India, especially in environments where caste, labor, and belief intersect. The work draws from the symbolism of Chhinnamasta, reinterpreting her cycle of creation, preservation, and destruction as a contemporary logic of self-exposure and resistance.

The installation uses local bamboo scaffolding, recycled animal hides, industrial debris, and regional calendar pages, materials deeply tied to everyday survival in lower-caste communities. The Trinity Puzzle section incorporates blue Dalit-associated text fragments arranged in scrambled sequences, requiring viewers to “spend time” reconstructing meaning. This reading process becomes a quiet act of confronting the social cycles that structure caste hierarchies.

Rather than representing a single encounter, the work reflects the broader political and spiritual tensions I observed on-site. It is both a ritual structure and a social commentary, exploring how marginalized groups sustain belief, dignity, and resistance within systems that attempt to contain them.

What do you hope people take away from your art when they experience it?

I hope my work slows people down, just enough for them to sense the nearly imperceptible rhythms that still exist beneath the noise of modern life.

I am not offering solutions or nostalgia. Instead, I create openings where viewers can feel the tension between decay and vitality, between the synthetic and the natural, between technology and myth.

If people walk away with a renewed awareness, an understanding that coexistence requires reciprocity rather than control, then the work has done its job. Ultimately, I want my works to reactivate a form of ecological perception that our era is rapidly losing.

Text & photo courtesy of Dongbay (Yübo Xü)

Website: https://totemdongbay.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/totemdongbay/