Ice Blueprint: Field Traces is a video work developed from artist Xi Li’s three-month independent residency-based field research and artistic practice in Harbin, China, from late 2024 to early 2025. Composed of video footage, situated observations, and research-based video documentation gathered throughout the residency, the work transforms the experience of fieldwork into an evolving visual archive.
The work focuses on the “ice and snow landscape” shaped through the intersection of festival economies and national narratives. It explores how ice and snow are produced, organised, displayed, and consumed, and how this system leaves material and psychological traces across urban and natural environments. Through observation, reflection, and embodied experience, Xi Li transforms movements and encounters from the field into a psychological map between geographic space and perception, tracing trajectories across ice, urban space, and psychic boundaries, while reflecting the complex social, material, and ecological contexts of the ice and snow ethnography of Northeast China.
The video is structured in four chapters, moving between the labour of ice sculptors, the public celebration and visual spectacle of Harbin Ice and Snow World, the material environment of the city, and the artist’s own perceptual and embodied experience.
During the fieldwork, Xi Li followed a series of unplanned crossings into different ice and snow environments: river surfaces covered with discarded construction ice, deeper areas of the river, boats moored in the ice and the fishermen living on them, as well as the central sites and ice-storage facilities associated with the ice and snow festival. She also relocated discarded blocks of ice from a waste ice field to an island on the outskirts of the city that is gradually disappearing, bringing material surplus from the festival production system into a different and temporary geographic and ecological relationship.
Presented in a form close to a rough cut and field archive, the film resists a complete or linear narrative. Instead, fragments of the city, peripheral ecologies, hidden spaces, and incidental encounters form a shifting network of visual relations. The work traces the relationships between ice, urban space, labour, infrastructure, and embodied experience, extending an ongoing observation of the social and ecological conditions surrounding the ice and snow landscape of Northeast China.
Chapters:
ICE BLUEPRINT: SYSTEM FILES — FIELD TRACES
001 · Spectacle Shell
002 · Transcend Carve
003 · Peripheral Acts
004 · Trace Experiments
