The Wende Museum in Culver City, California has announced that a new installation by Los Angeles-based contemporary artist Sichong Xie will open in the museum’s former East German guardhouse this Sunday, September 12. 

The guardhouse, which once monitored and controlled access to the state-run East German news agency, Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst, now hosts rotating installations by contemporary artists. 

As stated by the museum, Xie’s installation, Memory Structure, Scaffold Series, “features objects and arrangements emblematic of memory and temporality: bamboo scaffolding, embroidery on industrial mesh, and a set of laser-engraved drawings that will fade from continual exposure to light, through which the artist reimagines architectural drawings created by her grandfather in the late 1950s and early 1960s.” 

According to the project description, none of her grandfather’s building plans were realized after being exiled to a labor camp by Chinese authorities following the publication of a drawing considered critical of the government. The architectural drawings survived in the Xie family archives.

“By incorporating a hand-built bamboo scaffold behind the guardhouse, Xie metaphorically speaks to the invisible labor of workers often hidden behind the industrial mesh and scaffolding ubiquitous to construction sites. Memory Structure, Scaffold Series brings the materiality of the natural bamboo into direct conversation with the mass-produced nature of the scaffold and its role in development. The installation connects the soft memory of never-completed intellectual labor—the artist’s grandfather’s renderings—with the never-ending labor required by commercial building.”

An opening reception for Memory Structure, Scaffold Series will be hosted in the Wende Garden on September 12, 2021, at 3 P.M. PDT.