Zhongyuan Zhang

Back to Granary for 3 hrs is a research-based, site-specific installation that symbolically returns wheat from Lincolnshire—historically the grain source of London—back to the Granary Building, now home to Central Saint Martins. The project traces how spatial infrastructures shift from agricultural logistics to nodes of creative production, thereby exploring how material systems are transformed into symbolic economies.

The work is inspired by the Granary Building’s industrial past and the capital structures that continue to operate beneath its cultural functions. By cultivating wheat under tightly regulated temperature, humidity, and light conditions—and compressing a full day’s growth cycle into 200 seconds—the installation seeks to metaphorically reflect how both industrial agriculture and creative labour are subsumed into systems of optimisation, extraction, and control.

In the production process, I retrieved wheat directly from Lincolnshire, built a controlled plant chamber equipped with sensors and lighting systems, and embedded it into an exhibition structure in which the spatial logic of “monitoring–display” itself becomes part of what is seen. The theoretical framework ranges from Marx’s “metabolic rift” to Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects”, using the formal language of agriculture and growth to critically reconstruct the institutional structures and perceptual mechanisms of post-capitalist contexts.

This project asks: under the broader conditions of economic development and industrial transformation, has the nature of labour fundamentally changed? Within systems where visibility, productivity, and temporality are all preconditioned by institutional logics, does space still possess the capacity to produce? The work seeks to expose fissures between time, system, and land.