Roots of Roots: Making the buried visible

By Alastair JR Ball

The first thing I noticed at Roots of Roots at Filet wasn’t an artwork. It was the height of the floor. Or rather, how close some of the works demanded you get to it. Clay. Hair. Driftwood. Soil. The show begins low, insistently. Not with spectacle, but with sediment. It makes you crouch, peer down, recalibrate the angle of encounter.

This is a show about roots, and it asks you to start from below.

Curated by Chang Wang and Moyu Yang, Roots of Roots gathers a group of 50/50 Chinese and Western artists all working in London. Roots here are not worn as cultural markers or motifs. They are questions. How do we grow downward as well as forward? What does it mean to be rooted in a place you weren’t born in, or in a culture that never quite claimed you? What happens to roots when you keep moving?

One of the first pieces I was struck by was Georgia Salmond’s Ivy, which uses casts of ivy that had enveloped a tree to explore ideas of femininity. Her praxis uses the biological structure of plants and instantly brought ideas of how roots are essential to the natural world to mind. Placing this artwork in relation to artworks by Chinese artists made me think about the many different meanings of the word root and how they are all connected: grounding us, stabilising us, feeding us.

Sediment and storytelling

I began with Xiang Li’s To Root and Bloom, a sculpture placed directly on the floor, as if it had always belonged there. Plant fibres, human hair, clay. It radiated a kind of quiet insistence: soft, but unignorable. The work comes from an in-between space not resolution, but adaptation. The kind of root that doesn’t grip with force, but by staying, again and again.

Nearby, Sarah Fortais’ Lark leaned into London’s detritus: animal bones from the Thames, jackfruit skins, soil from the city’s edges. Bones, she writes, still marked with butchery from Smithfield Market. Jackfruit, both exoticised and consumed. In this stellated dodecahedron, nothing is native, but everything is absorbed. Here, roots are composite: historical, edible, necrotic, hybrid. I thought of compost. Of London as a digestive system.

Then there was Yihao Zhang’s Unlanded. Driftwood hung with fibrous cords, gently motorised, reaching downward but never quite making contact. Migration not as movement from A to B, but as a condition of suspended searching. The wood was heavy. The roots were light. The piece vibrated with longing, the kind that doesn’t resolve, only repeats.

Up on the wall, Xinyi Liu’s Elegy offered silver-plate images of fading flowers and dusk light. A reclamation of grief, in a culture that often hides it. Liu’s work asked: can nature help us face what we’ve learned to forget? In her hands, roots became metaphor: for loss, for tradition, for the unspoken.

Across the space, Jingtang Wang’s birch tree sculpture, its trunk bitten with dental moulds, refused easy metaphors. Roots were not the focus here; the tree was already altered. Bark like skin, eyes, scars. A witness to intervention. It made me think of orthodontics, urban planning, language acquisition. The ways we “straighten” ourselves to fit.

Toward the living trace

It was the performance piece that held me longest. “Undone” performed by Siyuan Meng and Fruzsina Nagy, with choreography by Meng and music by Christopher Rodriguez, unfolded slowly inside the window space. Fragile materials: rice paper, water, salt. The body moved through them like a weather pattern, deliberate, porous, erratic.

We stood still on the street outside the gallery, looking in, watching the performance slowly unfold, held in a kind of quiet suspense. The performance wasn’t theatrical. It was bodily, atmospheric. The paper tore with sound. Salt scattered like memory. Water pooled. What was left: the trace. This was not metaphor. This was rooting itself, slow, sensory, unpredictable.

Watching Meng and Nagy, I felt something shift. All the earlier works, with their fibres and bones and digital hauntings, had prepared me to see the body differently. As a root system. As a site of erosion. As something that remembers where it’s been, even if it no longer knows where it’s going.

Wang and Yang’s curatorial hand was subtle but insistent. The works rhizomed, connecting through association, texture, breath. You weren’t told what to feel. You had to root around for it. It felt less like walking through a gallery, more like falling into a subterranean network.

Roots of Roots is not a nostalgic show. It doesn’t mourn disconnection or celebrate belonging. It dwells in the liminal: where roots are gestures, not guarantees. It reminds us that we depend on what lies beneath, nutrients, memory, history, grief, and yet we rarely see it. These artists make the buried visible. Not as spectacle. As survival.

As I left the gallery, I found myself looking at the pavement differently. Wondering what ran under it. Wondering what still does.

Photography by Gehena Ye