Out of Season: an allegory left unsettled
from Yao Song, Hangping Yang
Editor: Yao Jiang, Mingyu Zhuang
2026.3.2
the 15th Shanghai Biennale, "Does the Flower Hear the Bee?"
Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China
At the closing phase of Out of Season (the 15th Shanghai Biennale, "Does the Flower Hear the Bee?"), pineapples in Xuwen County are also entering their harvest season. This small county, located at the southernmost tip of mainland China on the Leizhou Peninsula, is one of the country’s most important pineapple-producing regions. In March and April, if you walk into almost any self-built house in a village, piles of pineapples will be stacked at the entrance. If you miss the season, finding pineapples becomes a matter of luck; you can only find them in the fields or at roadside stalls, often under violent thunderstorms and sudden torrential winds. For those anticipating the harvest, this is clearly already “out of season.”
Gentle rain and flooding can occur simultaneously within a single storm. Pineapple plants are nourished by rainfall, yet cannot fully escape standing water and disease. Beneath the splendid crown, the fruit may reveal a fruitlet core rot (FCR) only when cut open. Black plastic mulch, irrigation systems, pesticides, these forms of human intervention that attempt to compress the unpredictable climate into a manageable scale. Yet uncertainty persists. Before the next season arrives, no one can foresee whether the fruit, when cut open, will reveal a full and radiant core. Even though the region averages nearly one hundred thunderstorm days per year, within the narrative of production, these storms are reduced to hostile background conditions: they can neither schedule seedlings nor bring fruit to market.
These climactic moments form the allegorical foundation of Out of Season: a pineapple falls ill during a thunderstorm, its surface glossy and immaculate, medicated for life, only to be cut open after death and found fruitlet rot at the core.
The first allegorical body is the recurring thunderstorm. The climate crisis is first and foremost a crisis of imagination. This is not merely about lacking effective strategies where experience cannot reach; it is also a questioning of the efficacy of experience itself. Leaving aside worlds beyond common sense, have we truly managed well even within the world experience claims to grasp?
We must first admit that the experiential world has become fluid beyond stability, even torrential. Under such complexity, we cast nets in haste and usually catch very few fish. Today, collective wisdom and community knowledge are often celebrated as the large fish of the moment. We do not oppose this, badly cooked fish is more often the cook’s problem than the ingredient’s. Yet the present situation often resembles using a monk from the south to strike a bell in the north, appearing considerate and inclusive. In reality, “local experience” has not even resolved its own marginal issues before being summoned to rescue the “center.” In such frantic circumstances, the real risk is overlooked: from a detached perspective, thunderstorms become objects to be observed, problems to be solved. Their ambiguity, complexity, and specificity are flattened and incorporated as raw material under the claim of “local knowledge.” Internal issues are deferred, while the structure of the “center” is paradoxically reinforced.
Drizzle Radar reenacts the condition of the thunderstorm. Two types of signal light are introduced: one beam passes through segmented colored glass; two others slant through metal boxes. The signals intersect inside the boxes and disperse outward, producing faint reflections on a metal facade and on the wall piece opposite, Scratch in the Air. Beneath an umbrella-like structure, silver strands of rain hover above internally illuminated aluminum boxes, supported by concrete blocks, reassembled into a miniature weather model.
The aluminum boxes and concrete blocks borrow similar formal structures. Though resembling apartment building models, their external appearance depends largely on whether their interiors are open, that is, on habitability. Open interiors offer the possibility of dwelling. The concrete blocks, cast in metal molds and filled with wood and mortar, form an embedded structure containing impurities, eventually presented as columns.
What occurred in this thunderstorm? It is embodied in the very instant when rain and electricity fall: fragments of experience are absorbed into the sensory structure, jointly bearing the weight of weather. In this placement, the work presents precisely this unresolved state, unavoidable infiltration, unforeseeable encounters, and inescapable structure.
Snare presents a chain of Out Of Season traits: bird spikes and seagulls, seagulls and potatoes, rope knots and pillars, shelters and seats that cannot be occupied. The title, Snare, carries a double meaning: producing a sharp, percussive echo while also suggesting a trap. Sharp metal barbs, fragile fiber knots, cold metal lightboxes, and the coarse skin of potatoes create material contrasts. Between different attributes lie hostility and temporary cooperation, mutual exclusion yet coordination. Control and openness coexist, like the top and bottom drumheads of a snare drum vibrating in cross resonance.
The installation’s tension does not unfold narratively but materializes as a physicalized awkwardness through materials and modes of assembly. To understand this condition, one must recall common urban dilemmas: we expel birds yet design architectural edges for them to perch upon; we advocate ecological coexistence while continuously delineating boundaries through technology and design. Coexistence becomes a managed order rather than a transformation of relationships.
We appear to respond promptly to environmental issues, yet rarely alter the logic that generates them. This pushes morality and decision-making into the dilemma of refined management: moral priority precedes, decision-making lags, leaving environmental questions suspended. When the vibration of the snare gradually stabilizes, the problem has not disappeared, it has merely entered the time.
Before arriving at the cruel conclusion of being cut open, it exists as an indistinguishable subject, having lost the function of self-identification.
Scratch in the Air revolves around a group of botanical field images. Three archival images originate from the first half of the twentieth century in Northeast China. They document botanical expeditions conducted along the Chinese Eastern Railway by Soviet geobotanist T. P. Gordeev and V. N. Jernakov, the contemporary deputy director of the Songjiang Provincial Science Museum.
When we attempt to enter a “real” historical site through these images, we struggle to discern their content. Are the fruit-like dark clusters decaying matter, intertwined branches, or marks left during archival dispersal? The image begins to blur.
In reproduction, although the aluminum plates still bear the engraved names of the original expedition sites, the entanglement of branches and paper scratches makes record and damage inseparable. Archival images and information, once serving identification and classification, drift through multiple movements in space and time. What remains is only the scratch. From this emerges both the void of history and the insecurity of the future.
When these three allegorical layers reflect one another, we return to the condition of being “out of season”: how do we confront the unresolved aspects of experience, intervention, and consequence? The exhibition space itself cannot be entered from a single viewing perspective. It was never meant to reconstruct a properly timed historical scene. The thunderstorm in the pineapple field is not a prelude to harvest. Nor was it ever “out of season.” A thunderstorm is simply a thunderstorm. What we can organize and mobilize is the sensory structure assembled from experience, through which we imagine the invisible world.
Thus, in the final allegorical layer, is “identification” still necessary? What remains necessary is the ability, through sensory structure, to return to the site of growth. Even while standing amid the roar of industrial machinery, one can still see countless pineapples supported by stems and leaves, swaying, rising and falling in the thunderstorms of the Leizhou Peninsula. If we lose our sense of time and do not know where we stand, perhaps we can plant coordinates like this allegory, and by listening to the echo of history to know ourselves.
Out of Season
Curated by Kitty Scott with co-curators Daisy Desrosiers and Xue Tan.
PlantSouthSalesroom Team: Hangping Yang , Mingyu Zhuang , Yao Song , Yao Jiang, Zian Lu, Siyao Deng
Photograph by @cameradoggy
Curated by Kitty Scott with co-curators Daisy Desrosiers and Xue Tan.
PlantSouthSalesroom Team: Hangping Yang , Mingyu Zhuang , Yao Song , Yao Jiang, Zian Lu, Siyao Deng
Photograph by @cameradoggy