The Places We Didn’t Look From: Tracing Site-Specific Art by Ethnic Minority Artists in Tibet and Inner Mongolia, 1990–2000s

Contemporary Chinese art is often encountered through layers of accumulated writing, interpretation, and remembrance. Its contours have been defined, its landmarks named, and its stories rehearsed enough to appear almost natural. Familiar figures and cities anchor this narrative, creating a sense of recognition and ease that smooths over questions of how such coherence came to be.

Yet every history is shaped by a position, and every position leaves a trace.^[1] What falls outside the framework is not necessarily marginal or silent, but oriented differently—unfolding along other rhythms, shaped by other pressures, and marked by other ways of being present. In these spaces, time advances unevenly, authorship^[2] is insecure, and visibility is never neutral in the absence of attribution and context.

This essay examines how site-specific^[3] works by ethnic minority artists in the autonomous regions of Tibet and Inner Mongolia proceed from such positions. These regions are not distant references or cultural peripheries, but places where contemporary art has been conceived, practised, and negotiated. In this trajectory, ‘site’ is a condition in which land, bodies, institutions, and histories intersect and mutually shape one another. Approaching these sites that are only partially researched and documented is not an attempt to fill in a missing history; rather, it involves acknowledging this incompleteness, gently unravelling fixed narratives to give way to new perspectives on contemporary art.

Site and Collaboration in Tibet (1987–1996): From Intuitive Action to Collective Participation

In 1987, on the remote and open shores of Pangong Lake in Tibet, two young men—Tibetan Nortse (Norbu Tsering) and Han Chinese Liu Zhuoquan—wrapped themselves in red and white fabric as they talked in the highland wind and photographed each other. At the time, both youngsters were colleagues at the Tibet Television Station and lived in the same staff dormitory. Their collaboration did not arise from a formal understanding of artistic practice but grew from an everyday relationship shaped by shared work and proximity.

Nortse and Liu were not yet familiar with the terms ‘site-specific art’ or ‘in-situ practice’. What guided their actions was intuition, formed through a shared rhythm of time and labour, in which they responded to the landscape and to their own and each other’s presence. Some aspects of these actions drew upon images of performance art pieces they had encountered in books and catalogues. Yet on Pangong Lake, these references were transformed into a brief and concrete physical practice, carried out through collaboration but not yet named as such. Only years later did photographs of this undertaking become known as Bound-up Scenery (1987). As one of the first experimental site-specific works in Tibet and an early collaboration between contemporary Tibetan and Han Chinese artists, the piece became an important point of reference in the history of Tibetan contemporary art.

Several years later, this form of collaboration, grounded in intuition and everyday relations, began to emerge in more complex conditions. In 1996, the art event series Keepers of the Waters (Lhasa),^[4] a public art project initiated by American artist Betsey Damon about safeguarding water resources, was held along the Lhasa River. This large-scale initiative was developed through an organised framework of collaboration, becoming an important early reference to collaborative practice in Tibetan contemporary art. From the outside, it appeared to be driven by an international, artist-led initiative. However, the reality was that the Lhasa phase was overseen locally by the Tibet Artists Association (the provincial arm of the China Artists Association), which liaised with participating artists and facilitated the project’s development.

Keepers of the Water (Lhasa) not only involved the artists but also included local residents, schools, government departments, and other everyday users of the city’s water resources. This widespread participation relied on coordination, communication, and local knowledge, in which art was no longer confined to a response between body and landscape and gradually shifted towards collective action. From this perspective, the boundaries of making art became increasingly blurry: Who conceived it, who carried it out, and whose artistic agency remained visible in later accounts? These questions were not explicitly raised at the time but were already embedded in how participation was organised within the initiative. As a result, issues of authorship and attribution that are implicit in Bound-up Scenery become more complex and concrete in Keepers of the Water.

Furthermore, the collaborative relationships in Keepers of the Waters (Lhasa) bore pressures of visibility and interpretation. As the project was documented, circulated, and later retold, it entered a wider field of viewing. Through this process, certain forms of artistic agency became more legible, while others receded into the background. Research indicates that many participating artists working in Tibet were not properly documented in existing records and media narratives; their roles were often reduced to assisting positions for other mainstream artists rather than collaborators. Hence, collaboration, once grounded in actions in tandem and shared time, was reorganised into a narratable structure—one that could be understood, exhibited, and incorporated into an emerging artistic vocabulary.

The works of Tibetan artists Gade (born 1971, Lhasa) and Tsewang Tashi (born 1963, Lhasa) emerged under these conditions, each negotiating, in different ways, the relationship between artistic practice and visibility. Gade’s The This-shore, The Other-shore (1996) consisted of white T-shirts with printed images of the Green Tara scriptures^[5] hung over simple, cross-shaped wooden frames. Installed along the Lhasa River and arranged according to the water levels and the direction of the current, the garments partially submerged and resurfaced. The work did not offer a focal point, but dispersed the viewer’s attention across the T-shirts, the wooden structures that held them, the water, and their reflections. As everyday objects worn on the body, the T-shirts were juxtaposed with the river as a site of natural and cultural significance, allowing body, belief, and environment to momentarily overlap in the visual field.

Meanwhile, Tsewang Tashi’s Life Release (1996) further blurs the lines between artistic action and everyday experience. Its title refers to the age-old practice in Tibetan culture and religious life, releasing captured animals to nature to cultivate compassion. The work is not an artistic action that can be defined by a single author, but arises from existing religious ethics, local knowledge, and an art making process that involves multiple participants. It is worth noting that in subsequent documentation and presentation processes, these participants—including other artists in Tibet—are often not explicitly identified as co-creators of the work but incorporated as part of ‘Tibetan culture’ or ‘local context’, where their agency gradually receded from view.

Viewed alongside Keepers of the Waters (Lhasa), The This-shore, The Other-shore and Life Releasing reveal a shift in site-based practices in the 1990s. These approaches increasingly relied on local knowledge, collective participation, and everyday relationships while being absorbed into frameworks of documentation, exhibition, and discourse. These issues did not immediately give rise to overt conflict, but they reflect a structural tension in which collaboration continued without remaining fully equal or unacknowledged. Questions of who is recognised as the author, who is recorded as a participant, and who is ultimately made part of the site began to surface as unavoidable issues, even as they were insufficiently articulated.

Similar issues emerged in Inner Mongolia, although through different concrete operational modes. In Tibet, site-specific practices gradually took shape through a complex and delayed engagement with international contemporary art vocabularies and art-historical narratives centred on the Han-Chinese cultural and art-historical discourse. In Inner Mongolia, however, artistic practices often unfolded through negotiations and tensions within official institutional frameworks and boundaries. Artists worked inside these structural conditions but also recalibrated their relationship to those same conditions.

Works such as Winter (1990) by Xie Jiande (born 1962, Hohhot), Saddle and Horse Series (1996–1998) by Asbagana. B (born 1961, Xilingol League), and Red, Yellow, and Blue (1996) by Urigen (born 1965, Xilingol League) offer telling examples. These works may appear restrained in language and understated in form, lacking overt markers of contemporaneity. Yet in the Inner Mongolian art context of the 1990s, such approaches were far from mainstream. Artistic styles promoted by China’s official art system were dominated by ethnic style paintings and narrative representations, prescribing a clear and fixed imaginative framework for what was considered ethnic art. Against this backdrop, the formal and linguistic choices made in these works placed them outside the expected modes of viewing, pushing them towards marginal positions amid the prevailing evaluative structure.

The significance of these works does not lie in whether they appear avant-garde, but in how they gradually and carefully recalibrate the possibilities of artistic practice within the space permitted by institutional structures. Rather than fiercely confronting the existing system, artists gently reworked prevalent norms through shifts in form, colour, and visual rhythm. Such incremental and sustained changes allowed Inner Mongolian practices to articulate a different structure from that of Tibet. Instead of being recognised externally through site-based actions, these practices emerged slowly through adjustment and accumulation inside institutional systems.

These differences reveal multiple and unstable configurations of site. In Tibet, it is often materialised through artistic actions, taking shape as a convergence of bodies, landscapes, and communities. In Inner Mongolia, it is frequently structured through institutional conditions that determine how artistic practices are viewed, understood, or excluded. Whether constituted through natural landscapes or institutional systems, site is never derived from neutral or passive positions but actively influences how artistic practice is recorded and entered into narrative structures.

Tibet and Inner Mongolia: Historical Entanglements and Artistic Practice

As the structural tensions outlined above gradually come into view, a question emerges: Why should we examine Tibet and Inner Mongolia in order to understand site-based practices in the 1990s and 2000s? This juxtaposition is not motivated by an emphasis on the margins or romanticised imaginations. Rather, it reflects that both regions^[6] have long been situated in comparable and complex structures shaped by geography, historical experience, and institutional conditions. Located in China’s peripheries—with Tibet in the west and Inner Mongolia in the north—both regions carry legacies of imperial governance, ethnic relations, and state formations, rendering regionality a condition closely entangled with power configurations, population movement, and knowledge distribution.^[7]

From an extended cultural and religious perspective, the connections between Tibet and Inner Mongolia did not begin to form only in modern times. The spread of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolian culture facilitated ongoing cross-regional translation and reconfiguration processes across religious practices, architectural forms, and linguistic systems.^[8] Sites such as Hohhot’s Jokhang Temple—where spatial organisation and the presence of Tibetan script continue to coexist—bear visible traces of this historical interlacing. In contemporary times, these cross-regional connections have not been disrupted but transformed into an intimate network of practices. Artists in both regions maintained contact with one another, and exhibitions, exchanges, and collaborations formed concrete channels, preventing their practices from developing as isolated, local events.^[9]

At the same time, contemporary art practices in Tibet and Inner Mongolia have never developed independently under closed regional conditions. On the one hand, they remain connected to international contemporary art vocabularies and exhibition systems; on the other, they are deeply embedded in the art education systems, exhibition networks, and art-historical discourses of a Han-centred cultural field. These structural influences have long shaped how artistic practices in both regions are understood, recorded, and narrated. In this sense, site becomes a composite configuration formed through the interaction of local experiences, state institutions, and global contexts. Placing Tibet and Inner Mongolia in dialogue, therefore, is less about comparing differences than about examining how artistic practice is absorbed, transformed, and reconfigured as relations of participation, collaboration, and visibility are rearranged. The cases discussed below should not be understood as isolated local practices, but as placements within a relational network spanning local communities, Han-centred institutional and art‑historical frameworks, and the world.

In this structural background, Maintaining the Pregnancy (1989–ongoing) by Inner Mongolian artist Yi De Er (born 1961, Beijing) became a critical work. Yi began creating the work at the time when the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition (1989) was shut down, after artist Xiao Lu (born 1962, Hangzhou) fired a pistol at her own installation during the opening day. Although Yi was in Inner Mongolia during that period, he paid close attention to the broader trajectory of Chinese contemporary art. Maintaining the Pregnancy arose from an urgent, though not yet fully articulated, question: Under highly uncertain conditions, could the unsettled impulse of art be sustained at all?

In the artist’s concept, the notion of ‘pregnancy’ points to a cultural and spiritual state that was still taking shape. Presented as an installation, the work features television imagery, heartbeat sounds, infusion devices, and red liquid slowly dripping into a glass container with an egg yolk inside. These elements form a direct visual language, perhaps even an excessive one. Yi later reflected on the explicitness of this mode of expression; yet it is precisely this excessiveness that captures an anxious and fragile historical moment, a significant attempt by Yi alone, to safeguard and prolong the spirit of contemporary art at a time when its future remained profoundly uncertain.

Concurrently, the academic writings and curatorial practices of figures such as Leng Lin and Wu Hung^[10] indicate a core concern: As artistic practice was increasingly interpreted through Western frameworks of ‘Chineseness’, who was speaking as the subject, and who was being spoken for? Exhibitions such as It’s Me! A profile of Chinese Contemporary Art in the 90s (1998),^[11] curated by Leng, surveyed major developments of the decade and foregrounded debates over identity, experimentation, and institutional transformation in post-socialist China. In doing so, the show reflected how the ‘I’ could no longer be a self-evident existence, but a subject of sustained questioning: How am ‘I’ seen, and who defines ‘me’?

These issues were not limited to works by Han Chinese artists; they also influenced how ethnic minority contemporary art practices were developed. In this regard, ethnic identity no longer appeared merely as a folkloric or cultural motif; rather, it was folded into the same conceptual and aesthetic concerns, becoming a way for artists to articulate their subjectivity. In this historical context, Maintaining the Pregnancy could be considered as a response to an unsettled condition: Could Chinese contemporary art, still in its formative stages, continue to develop in an undefined way as many artists envisioned?

Whether through questions of subjectivity raised by It’s Me or gestures of expectation and continuation explored in Maintaining the Pregnancy, they both point to an ongoing, undetermined process of self-understanding. In this sense, ethnic minority art and Han Chinese art did not develop as parallel trajectories. Instead, they emerged through a shared problem that shaped, and was shaped by, one another. From this perspective, contemporary art practices in Tibet and Inner Mongolia are also critical sites for understanding the debate on Chineseness in the 1990s.^[12]

Site in Motion: Self-Organisation and Mobility Across Tibet and Inner Mongolia

In the twenty-first century, contemporary art practices in Tibet and Inner Mongolia have continued to engage with discussions that emerged in the 1990s. Relationships connected to identity, position, visibility, and collaboration were still in flux, drawn into a tightly interconnected structure. If identity in the 1990s was understood not as a given cultural label but as a practice continually adjusted within specific sites, everyday relations, and institutional gaps, then shifts that occurred in the 2000s shaped how these practices were amplified, translated, and absorbed into different narratives through more fluid and complex networks.

On the other hand, art education systems, exhibition networks, and critical discourses rooted in a Han-centred cultural field, together with international curatorial mechanisms, resource flows, and contemporary art vocabularies, have gradually become part of the everyday working conditions of Tibetan and Inner Mongolian artists. Through ongoing engagement with both fields, their identities have been repeatedly rehearsed and have become a way of living.

In 2003, the Tibetan artist collective Gendun Chopel^[13] was established in Lhasa, where it opened the city’s first artist-run space in Barkhor Street, a renowned pilgrimage and shopping street. Beyond providing a venue for exhibitions and exchange, the space offered a self-organisational structure that enabled artists to sustain their practices, actively contributing to the development of Tibetan contemporary art in the early 2000s.

It is important to note that the emergence of Gendun Chopel was driven more by Lhasa’s transforming urban environment than by abstract artistic ideals alone. As internationalisation and tourism accelerated in the early twenty-first century, Barkhor Street became the go-to place for visitors to purchase souvenirs and artworks. This commercial marketplace environment motivated Tibetan artists to establish the space. In its early days, Gendun Chopel operated as a gallery, with artists alternating between exhibiting work and managing the space, sustaining it through everyday labour and sales. This mode of operation aligned with neither commercial gallery systems nor the China Artists Association’s official exhibition mechanism. Instead, it formed a pragmatic yet fragile balance between the tourist economy and practices of art and self-organisation.

At the same time, international attention on Tibetan artists gradually influenced their development. According to Gade, a founding member of Gendun Chopel, an article in the New York Times brought them unexpected and significant visibility in the global art world, drawing the attention of multiple art institutions abroad. The promotion and overseas sales of Tibetan artists’ works through international galleries also supported Gendun Chopel’s development. It is precisely this combination of local practice, media exposure, and transnational art networks that laid the foundation for Tibetan contemporary art to establish a global presence.

However, Gendun Chopel cannot be understood simply as a successful case of internationalisation. Rather, it reveals the complex position Tibetan contemporary art occupied in the 2000s: Self-organisation depended on the support of the tourism economy and market circulation, yet was simultaneously shaped by international art institutions and discursive frameworks. The artists’ autonomy and their language were constantly negotiated and recalibrated between these factors. In this sense, Gendun Chopel was not only an art venue but also a concrete site where identity could be repeatedly enacted as a practice.

While Tibetan contemporary art in the 2000s developed through a relatively concentrated trajectory centred on Lhasa, Inner Mongolian contemporary art presents a more open, decentralised and highly mobile ecology. This divergence did not stem from differences in how artists questioned site or identity, but was closely related to the institutional conditions and operational spaces of these practices. The absence of stable platforms for self-organisation and long-term local venues made it difficult for artists in Inner Mongolia to accumulate their practices within one location. Instead, they unfolded through temporary gatherings, transregional work relationships, and transient crossings in and out of different cities and institutional settings. Under these fluid conditions, site emerged as a network made of multiple provisional points of action.

In this context, a series of works by Yi De Er around the turn of 2000 began to reflect on the fluidity of viewing and self-positioning. In his photographic work Reflection (2000), completed in Beijing and Hohhot (the provincial capital of Inner Mongolia), Yi uses a small mirror to capture his surroundings and attempts to identify his location indirectly. By incorporating himself and the space he occupies in the frame, Yi does not treat either Beijing or Hohhot as being central to the work. Instead, by juxtaposing the two cities, viewing becomes a state of transition, where it is positioned in the centralised space of the Chinese contemporary art system and local experience in Inner Mongolia, without being fully defined by a single geographical or cultural location. In this configuration, a site is no longer just a specific location but an experiential condition continuously generated through movement, viewing, and self-positioning. Identity, in turn, becomes a practice repeatedly adjusted as the site shifts.

Another example is Divination (2002) by Burenerdene (born 1973, Hohhot), which further transforms this uncertainty and ambiguity into a symbolic gesture of inquiry. Using the bones of the five herding animals in Mongolian nomadic culture—sheep, goat, cattle, horse, and camel—which symbolise origin and continuity, Burenerdene draws upon a traditional knowledge system and translates it into a contemporary artistic vocabulary. Here, divination is not treated as a folkloric practice, but unfolds in an open natural landscape, where the site functions as a temporarily activated space for reflection rather than a preconceived cultural backdrop. Combined with the artist’s own experience of moving from Inner Mongolia to the Beijing art scene, Divination reads more as a form of self-questioning: How does a person understand their own position and value while moving across cultural and institutional contexts? Invoking a traditional knowledge system does not lead to a fixed cultural statement. Instead, it is suspended in an unfinished state, sustained through the process of translation as the work moves between different sites.

By contrast, Qin Ga’s The Miniature Long March Site 3 (2002) transforms walking and site into a methodological approach. At the time, many artists involved in The Long March Project (1999–ongoing) physically retraced the historic route of the Red Army’s Long March. However, Qin tattooed on his own back a map of this route. Showing China and its neighbouring countries, the map becomes a geopolitical metaphor. In doing so, he compresses history, memory, and spatial experience into a portable action structure, through which site emerges as a relational process continually produced through the body’s movement. The photographic works of this piece were later incorporated into international collections and exhibitions, indicating how artists in Inner Mongolia in the 2000s often entered broader contemporary art contexts through such mobile and translatable site-based practices.

Together, these works reflect a decentralised ecology in which mobility functioned as a default condition, giving Inner Mongolian contemporary art its striking diversity in the 2000s. However, as artistic practices moved through the exhibition spaces, curatorial narratives, and circulatory mechanisms of the Beijing and international art systems, site no longer referred only to the immediate conditions in which a work was made, but increasingly to the institutional and interpretive frameworks that enabled its visibility and legibility. In this sense, site became a condition of production as well as a selection and definition mechanism. Consequently, a new question for ethnic minority contemporary art arises: How are ethnic experiences positioned, translated, or even repackaged?

Beyond Folklorisation: Site, Language, and Everyday Realities

In the 2000s, folklorising interpretations gradually became a latent risk in understanding ethnic minority contemporary art. This risk did not arise from the artists’ use of tradition, religion, or ethnic experience, but from how visual elements in the work are easily detached from their contexts and simplified into easily recognisable cultural symbols during the viewing process.^[14] In fact, most of these works were not displays of culture, but the sedimentation of lived experiences, bodily perception, and reflections.

Gade’s Ice Buddha (2006) grew out of his long-term observation of the relationship between the everyday environment and religious experience. Rather than simply reproducing a religious image, he grounds the work in the perception of impermanence as a lived condition. He collected water from the Lhasa River and froze it, allowing the water, marked by Lhasa’s natural conditions and seasonal changes, to imbue the work with a site-specific quality and to give the melting Buddha sculpture an experiential process. Some critics interpreted the work as a response to the dissolution of the Tibetan tradition and religion in broader global political and cultural contexts.^[15] However, Gade’s daily experience is shaped by both the socio-political conditions and the natural environment. It is within this reality that the notion of ‘disappearance’ in Ice Buddha shifts from macro-level narratives to the tangible and experiential present. Therefore, the work does not function solely as an image of belief but unfolds as a dual reflection situated between time, nature, and existential conditions.

Another work, Dialogue Series I (2009) by Nortse and Liu Zhuoquan, marks a turning point in the duo’s long-term collaboration. Compared to Bound-up Scenery, in which both artists’ bodies were tightly wrapped in fabric in a shared space, the ‘dialogue’ in this later series is built upon distance. Although Nortse and Liu are physically in the same site, their spatial distance is characterised by the wooden poles and water feature, creating a sense of forced separation. This separation is not only a formal choice but reflects shifts in their collaborative relationship over more than two decades—from a personal artistic friendship to an awareness of the fraught dynamics between Han Chinese and Tibetans. Here, site no longer functions as a shared ground but becomes a condition for creating distance. Topography and spatial arrangements actively intervene the possibility of dialogue, structuring the exchange as asymmetrical and impassible. As a result, Dialogue Series I does not present the completion of communication, but a calm observation of how relationships are reconfigured within specific sites.

In a different register, Kuang Laowu belongs to a generation of Tibetan artists who completed their education in Mandarin Chinese, with limited formal instruction in Tibetan. Born in 1975 in the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan province, Kuang’s own experience reflects a broader generational condition in which Tibetan has not been consistently preserved as a language that can be acquired through everyday use. Writing of the Six-Syllable Mantra (2002–2003) emerges from this condition. In the work, a Tibetan mantra is written on the artist’s back while he stands nude in a Tibetan landscape. Here, language is not reactivated through formal study, but through physical action shaped by both self-exposure and mediated writing. Site therefore shifts from a symbolic cultural field to a physical point of contact, where language, body, and belonging briefly reconnect. Writing in this context is less about allowing Kuang to return to tradition or affirming his identity than about temporarily re-establishing continuity after rupture.

Another example is Yi De Er’s photographic work Golden Fairy Tale—Thinker (2002), which presents a form of subjectivity and identity marked by presence and instability. Photographed at an ordinary urban intersection, the artist’s torso emerges from a manhole, briefly interrupting the rhythms of everyday city life. His partially exposed body is not a symbolic performance, but a direct response to the subjective conditions shaped by modernisation, migration, and social restructuring. Site then is more than a physical location; it is a social condition that constrains and negotiates how the body appears, how it is restricted, and how it is identified.

In Golden Fairy Tale—Speaker—Narrator (2003), Yi places slogans in the auditorium of a public town hall, making language part of the site. The slogans, written in simplified Chinese and Mongolian, appear side by side, yet they do not form a clear or unified meaning, retaining subtle differences in semantics and reference. Here, language becomes a visual element constructed through composition, spatial arrangement, and conceptual framing—visible yet difficult to understand. This incomplete presentation echoes the gradual weakening of Mongolian in Inner Mongolia’s modernisation and urbanisation: The language still exists but no longer occupies a central role, and its everyday use is scarcely passed on. Therefore, the work is not concerned with linguistic content, but with how language remains constantly visible yet unstable, becoming marginalised within specific sites.

From the perceptible disappearance depicted in Ice Buddha, to the sense of distance created by the site’s spatial configuration in Dialogue Series 1, and to the partial visibility of language and the body in urban spaces depicted in Yi’s works, these pieces demonstrate how artists respond to the concrete conditions of their sites of practice. How a body appears, how language is retained or detached, and how relationships are rearranged are not abstract theoretical propositions but realities that artists repeatedly experience in everyday life. It is through such detailed and fleeting actions that ethnic minority contemporary art reveals the depth of its present complexities, as an ongoing practice rather than cultural objects.

In these practices, the issue is not whether ethnic minority contemporary art is visible, but how it is understood and categorised. Returning to the risk of folklorisation mentioned earlier, this process of recognition often turns ethnic identity into repeated and consumable forms that are easily recognised. In doing so, it compresses the lived conditions from which such practices emerge. This causes artists to be seen less as epistemic subjects than as carriers of style or identity, leaving their practices to oscillate between lived experience and expected appearance. Therefore, reinterpreting ethnic minority art as a practice grounded in mobility, everyday life, and situated knowledge becomes an essential starting point for resisting folklorised readings and understanding its contemporaneity.

Where Viewing Begins: Shifting Ways of Seeing

In reviewing artistic practices in Tibet and Inner Mongolia, site-specificity encompasses multiple meanings. It may take the form of concrete geographical settings such as plateaus, rivers, or urban edges, or manifest as temporary points where the body pauses and action takes place. At the same time, it points to the institutional conditions under which art is viewed, understood, and categorised. In other words, within these practices, site-specific art is not only the location of making work, but also the natural environments, social conditions, and interpersonal relationships that enable art to take form, circulate, and be interpreted.

Under these different conditions, site manifests in many ways through the art making process, including influencing how collaboration unfolds, how visibility emerges, and how identity is practised. These reflections reject the labelling of identity, allowing it to be continuously adjusted through mobility, dialogue, institutional gaps, and everyday labour. When a work by an ethnic minority artist enters wider circuits of viewing and circulation, folklorisation becomes a constant risk: Complex and concrete life experiences are translated into recognisable and repeatable forms, making certain elements understandable while obscuring the processes that produced them.

What these works present is the artists’ response to their specific realities. A sense of distance, physical constraint, and partial visibility arise from their lived realities. Site therefore does not remain a static background but continues to influence how art is viewed and interpreted.

Ultimately, this study does not aim to assign a clear and fixed position to contemporary Chinese ethnic minority art. More importantly, it is about rethinking where viewing begins and how the viewer understands the conditions in which these works exist. When we no longer default to a fixed point of view or rush to name and categorise practices, those creations that remain unfinished and in flux can appear in their complexity and specificity. From this perspective, site-specific art, as an ongoing and evolving practice, continues to reveal new layers of meaning that are not yet completely fixed.