Ni Hui
Fine-art ProjectsLife Report-19492020
The Lingering Shadow
The Sharpness of Fading
The Uninherited

Other Projects
Stages of Love
V-POV
I Am My Only Witness
Fashion
Profile
Life Report-19492020
Tides in the Lungs (2025)
Installation
Tides in the Lungs is an art installation that simulates the state of my grandfather being kept alive by machines while in a coma in the ICU before his passing.It was inspired by the moment I visited him in the ICU and saw him inflated and deflated like a balloon. At that point, he had become a life-sustaining machine, stripped of the right to interpret his own life. His past realities had turned into stories that others could freely reshape. To me, that moment marked the beginning of his departure. Hence, I recreated this scene into an installation, combining it with the stories I pieced together about him, hoping to reconstruct a complete impression of who he was.
The installation consists of three parts: a silicone air bladder representing the human body, photos dissolving in IV bags, and a television playing interview recordings.
For the sound component, I recorded elderly people chanting prayers at a local funeral, which I then mixed with ventilator sound effects and interview recordings. This audio composition is played on-site along with the interview content.
The silicone bladder is controlled by an inflation-deflation device I built using Arduino.
The photos in the IV bags are selected from the typological object images in the end pages of Before Amnesia Begins Its Survey — ones representative of my grandfather’s life.
The ink of these images slowly dissolves in the fluid inside the IV bags and eventually flows toward the air bladder.
Before Amnesia Begins Its Survey, view details in the follwing section
Life Report-19492020 originated from the day my grandfather passed away. The complex mixture of indifference and grief among the family members present that day sparked my curiosity about the life of this solitary old man. Between 2023 and 2025, through oral history interviews and field research, I gradually uncovered the turbulent and previously unknown chapters of his past. Traveling to places such as Wenzhou, Beijing, and Yichang, I attempted to revisit his story through photography from a contemporary perspective, while also speculating about his mindset and thoughts. The vast majority of these photographs were taken using medium format film, both as a way to evoke the texture and feel of his era and to immerse myself in the fully manual shooting process, which brought me closer to the psychological experience of that time. I had only ever known the fading figure of his later years, but now I hope to use these images and the act of capturing them to draw closer to understanding him—and to trace the broader narrative of his generation through his silhouette.

Installation video via Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/1117678005?share=copy
Installation video via Youtube: https://youtu.be/ugktJ6c5mDs