Sciography by Kien Situ

Sciography is a site-specific solo exhibition at Bankstown Arts Centre, tracing the intersections of matter, time, and form as active forces in space. Through the fusion of Chinese ink, incense ash, and concrete, Situ engages materiality as a state of flux - between transformation and permanence, emergence and erosion, solidity and ruin. 

“I grew up in a house like a ruined lung.”

Sciography, derived from the Greek σκιά (skia, shadow) and γράφειν (graphein, to write),
is the study of shadow projection—an ancient practice that traces the interplay between
shadow, structure, and time. Beyond its origins in perspective drawing, sciography is a
material and spatial syntax, a way of inscribing time onto surfaces, revealing the
latent geometries of architecture through the transience of light.

For this project, Kien Situ presents a distorted, graphic timber structure composed of
a ‘forest’ of inclined columns, each hand-painted in Chinese ink - a first-time fusion
of these materials in his practice. The work exists at the intersection of construction
and collapse, tenuously balancing between form and formlessness, order and entropy. The
columns, tilted across two axes, disrupt the stability of the grid, engaging with
deconstructivist logic and the corruption of structural certainty. This destabilisation
is not just architectural but psychological, evoking Jungian notions of shadow and the
unconscious — a site of rupture, transformation, and becoming.

Situ’s relationship with architecture is shaped by early memories of living in skeletal
structures, unfinished houses, designed and often hand-built by his architect parents —
frameworks in a state of emergence, with material and form in states of perpetual flux.
His Hakka Chinese ancestry, tied to histories of nomadism, and his Vietnamese heritage,
shaped by forced migration, embed his practice within a lineage of transitory
architecture. He recalls inhabiting spaces that felt neither complete nor abandoned,
suspended in a cycle of ruin and renewal.

Recently, he has been working on construction sites with Vietnamese builders,
revisiting the building techniques of his childhood. Rooted in East Asian post-and-beam
traditions, this work exists as a field of columns, an artificial forest free of walls—
an open system that merges artifice and nature. At the exhibition’s close, the timber
will be disassembled and reintegrated into a construction project, continuing its
architectural afterlife — a process akin to tái sinh (再⽣, regeneration), an unseen
mechanism through which form dissolves and reconfigures over time.

Unlike Western notions of permanence in architecture, this gesture aligns with East
Asian spatial philosophies, where structures are understood as dynamic, shifting
entities rather than static monuments. This cyclical movement reflects the transience
of built environments, shaped by time, use, and necessity. What was once an artwork
will return to function, continuing a lineage of construction that remains
indeterminate and responsive.