“Till Ashes Turn into Pines” by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Chen Zhan, Mengfan Wang

2025 · CN/UK · 9’ · World premiere · In competition

Set in an ordinary village on the outskirts of Wuhan, the film follows the intertwined lives of grannies and the surrounding pinewoods, where history unfolds through the material metabolism of everyday life.

Set in an ordinary village on the outskirts of Wuhan, the film follows the intertwined lives of grannies and the surrounding pinewoods, where history unfolds through the material metabolism of everyday life. They gather pine needles for fuel, tap resin and sell timber—mundane labours that sketch out a barely perceptible circuit of exchange linking the countryside and the city. These pine trees were once used, during the collectivisation era, to build the village’s People’s Commune Assembly Hall. At that time, the grannies were in the prime of their lives. Today, the long-abandoned hall awaits reactivation, its pinewood beams still intact. A fire, sparked by ritual offerings, unsettles these quiet relations. Rejecting linear narration, the film unfolds through fragments and resonances, attempting a kind of tuning to fragility, reciprocity, and reincarnation as the cyclical, material conditions of life.

This is the final part of a film trilogy under the project RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING, a ten-year relationship with a village community, attuning to how Chinese rural migrant workers make worlds.

The artists

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan are co-founders of field-0, a relation-oriented practice working across architecture, anthropology, art and film. Their recent exhibitions include solos Hydroelectric Spectre (Bangkok Kunsthalle, 2026), How Much Wattage Is One Handbreadth of Water (Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, 2025) and Ripple Ripple Rippling (Architectural Association, London, 2024), as well as participation in the Singapore Biennale: Pure Intention (Singapore, 2025-26). Their film work received the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival (2024) and the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival (2023).

Cyan is a transdisciplinary artist, originally trained in architecture. She was awarded the Harvard GSD’s 2023 Wheelwright Prize for TRACING SAND, and has exhibited as part of Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020-22), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019) and Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others.

Chen is an artist, independent filmmaker, anthropologist and architect. She previously worked at Heatherwick Studio in London on high-profile international projects, including the Changi Airport Terminal 5 in Singapore, Google Gradient Canopy Headquarters in California, and Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Leeds, UK.

Mengfan Wang is an independent theatre director and choreographer whose practice explores and reimagines performative expressions of ordinary and ageing bodies. Named a “Dance Hopeful (Hoffnungsträger)” by tanz magazine (2018), her works have been featured at the VIE Festival Bologna, Beijing Fringe Festival, and Wuzhen Theatre Festival. Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou and the West Bund Museum Shanghai, her latest piece, Narrative Fountain, appeared in Women in Motion 2023.

Cyan, Chen and Mengfan are collaborators of the transdisciplinary project RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING, a ten-year relationship with a village community on the outskirts of Wuhan, attuning to how Chinese rural migrant workers make worlds.