Follow the Feather extends Ruoyi Shi’s continued exploration of translation, expanding it beyond language into questions of transformation, migration, and belief. At the center of the exhibition is the Xian (仙), hybrid bird-human figures that appear in Han Dynasty reliefs and ancient Chinese scripts. Early depictions, told in the perspective of those who claimed to have once been Xian, describe Xian as beings that live in the mountains, subsisting on jujubes, mushrooms, dew, and cloud.

Though Xian is often translated as “immortals” or “transcendents,” no English equivalent fully captures the term. Suspended between the human and the divine, Xian inherited the role that birds have long occupied as messengers between worlds. Translation, likewise, is never simply the transfer of information, but rather a process of transformation–one that reshapes bodies, histories, and ways of knowing. It alters meanings, creates misunderstandings, and produces new realities. This process echoes through histories of language, mythology, and migration, where moving between places or cultures always demands forms of transformation that cannot be fully reversed. While the pursuit of transcendence has given way to the practical desire of building a life elsewhere, migrants often become legendary figures within the imaginations of those who remain behind—at once familiar and distant, ordinary and extraordinary, inhabiting spaces that can be mapped but never fully known. Like Xian, they exist in a state of perpetual translation.

In Follow the Feather, Shi presents fabricated artifacts and devices that promise perhaps impossible encounters. Hearing tunnels, cloud catchers, navigation tools, and optical instruments suggest a continued effort to reach the unreachable, while pages describing Xian inserted into birdwatching guides grant these figures the authority of scientific taxonomy. Silk drawings depict Xian only from behind, preserving the distance that has defined them for centuries and the cultivation of ceramic mushrooms stages an earnest attempt to approach the unreachable.

Borrowing the visual language of science, archaeology, and folklore, the works not only blur the line between evidence and invention but also claim space between the two. As with language or migration, the exhibition offers no stable point of arrival. Every crossing produces another threshold, every translation another version of reality. Xian remains neither proven nor disproven, existing instead in the fertile distance where myths persist, translations falter, and belief takes form.

Ruoyi Shi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Inspired by ancient tales and rituals intertwined with language, habits, and societal norms, she combines humor and fiction to construct her poetic narratives. Her work explores the interface between nature and artificial existences, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication.