How does a city appear when it is not looked at directly? In her drawings from a journey to Egypt, Liang Qingyuan maps Cairo not through its iconic monuments or picturesque architecture, but through a series of quiet glances. Each piece captures a gesture of attention–a stray dog resting beside a sign to the pyramids, the dashboard of the cab driver, a dry bush at the edge of a road, shoes half-buried in the sand. These moments read like marginal notes scribbled in a travel journal. Liang’s travelogue weaves fragments of reverie together, offering the viewer or the reader an itinerary marked by pauses and hesitations.
Her choice of materials sustains the delicacy and sophistication of looking. Graphite lends the drawings a palpable sense of breath and tremors. The powdered pigments of pastels hold on to the air, capturing the hazy shimmer from the sun that covers the city. Smudged shades of golden yellow, dusty violet, and pale sapphire diffuse across the page. The edges are blurred, the colours gathered and then dissolved. The result is an atmosphere rather than a depiction, as if the images were made from the very dust that coats Cairo’s streets. Like a film shot through a lens covered with pantyhose, these drawings render the city porous and fugitive, always about to disperse into the light. The city in Liang’s book is on the verge of vanishing, tempting the viewers to carefully hold on to each scene.
Her practice continues a lineage of artists who have turned wandering into a way of thinking and understanding. Liang wanders through Cairo following dust, light and trickling water. This act of wandering embodies Charles Baudelaire’s idea of flâneur, the wanderer exploring the urban space guided by drifting attention. In 1955, Guy-Ernest Debord, a member of Situationist International, further developed this impulse, suggesting psychogeography to explore how geographical locations shape individuals’ emotions and behaviours. Debord and situationist artists embraced playful and creative ways of navigating the urban space. One of the practices was dérive, literally meaning drift. Liang’s drawings are dérive of Cairo, presenting the poetic encounters with the city marked by subtle emotions.
In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo describes a hundred cities shaped by memory, fatigue, and desire to the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan. In truth, all the descriptions refer to different versions of a single city, Venice. Liang’s Cairo is similarly mutable and plural. The city she sketches is refracted through shifting light, feeling, and attention. It appears full of sun and vibrant colours in one page, then muted and faded in the following. Each act of seeing constructs a new version of the city, and each sheet emerges as a new territory. Yet these divergent narratives remain as half-formed lands, always ready to slip back into dust and air. The city Liang offers is to be drifted, wandered, and felt through.
In September, Liang Qingyuan’s Travelogue of Egypt (Egypt Travel Notes) was showcased at Looloolook Gallery, Paris, in a dual exhibition titled Inner Journeys, alongside Letizia Giannella.
Written by Kagyun Lee
Kahyun Lee is a curator, researcher, and writer based in London and Seoul. Her practice traces how modern and contemporary art reflects on the present and imagines alternative futures. Engaged with the formation of dominant narratives, Lee questions the structural frameworks such as institutions, national borders, and identities that shape art and its histories. She has contributed to Monthly Art, Qilu, Daejeon Museum of Art, and Seoripul Gallery as a writer. Currently a doctoral researcher at the Royal College of Art and Tate, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership, her research explores transnational curatorial practices and narratives of East Asian modern and contemporary art at Tate Modern. Lee has curated exhibitions and programmes at it’s a local collective, Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, and the Design Museum.
