Programmed as part of the NCAD Gallery Student Open Call 2025, the Gallery is delighted to present URBAN PARASITE: An exhibition of Chongquig Work Institute artists Bao Dachen, Dong Xun, and Wu Jianping curated by Yifeng Wei, NCAD School of Visual Culture PhD candidate and curator.

panel discussion 19 March, NCAD Gallery Foyer, 5PM.
City as Methodology with Dr Jye O’Sullivan, Yifeng Wei, and Dr Karl Whitney. All are welcome to attend, no booking required.

exhibition opening & walk-through 19 March, NCAD Gallery, 6PM.
Join Yifeng Wei, NCAD School of Visual Culture PhD candidate and curator of URBAN PARASITE on a walk-through of the exhibition. All are welcome to attend, no booking required.

When the humid subtropical monsoon retreats, the shimmering vapour rising from the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers becomes ensnared once more between the endless mountains, forming the lingering fog that cloaks Chongqing, an inland city in southwestern China. Featuring such a unique landscape and climate, Chongqing is a city about disappearing. Its perennial mist once overshadowed the secrets of the nuclear plant during the Cold War and nowadays its vertically stacked buildings obscure the prying eyes of GPS satellites.

In the opening scene of Crazy Stone, a film set in Chongqing, an idling layabout flirts with a young woman aboard a cable car suspended between the two great rivers. “Whenever I look at the city from this angle,” he muses, “I feel strongly that the city is a mother and we live in her womb…maternity, I feel such a maternity on you…”“Vermin,” other passengers retort unanimously. This amusing exchange delineates a thread of intimacy between the city and its inhabitants—a protective maternal body and its fragile foetus, or in another sense, a hospitable host and its voracious parasite.

In an era of pervasive surveillance and technological homogenisation, can a city still serve as a sanctuary? How do its residents forge a parasitic symbiosis with the urban fabric when technology becomes a vehicle for oppression? The exhibition Urban Parasite reimagines ‘Chongqing’ as an active verb—an ongoing negotiation between people, landscape, and climate—offering an embodied and adaptable response to the current crises. This exhibition showcases two collaborative video essays by Chinese artists Dong Xun, Bao Dachen, and Wu Jianping, members of the Chongqing Work Institute. While Rear Area (2018) uncovers the Artillery School’s concealed history and Chongqing’s strategic role in retreat and subterfuge, Defence System of the Mountain City: Action Guide for a Three-Dimensional City (2022) conceptualises a non-transparent methodology, drawing from the city’s rich history of resistance, shaped by over seven centuries of adaptation. Both works explore strategies for survival within the urban matrix, weaving a narrative of vertical space that extends from the underground to the clouds.