Adelle Yingxi Lin

Passage (2026) is an experimental single-channel film weaving site-based performance with early renders of a hybrid digital landscape. A 160-foot calligraphic scroll written in Chinese, Hebrew, and Arabic moves through desert, cemetery, and virtual terrain, becoming both a material object and a screen-based vessel for memory, migration, and the afterlives of place. Built from performances in Jordan and Singapore alongside LiDAR scans of landforms, architecture, and social spaces, the film explores how memory persists after migration and how distant histories can be recombined within computational space. Passage was screened as part of ONX Screens at Onassis ONX in New York in June 2026.

Artist, Performance, Editing, Sound, Hybrid World: Adelle Yingxi Lin

Cinematography, Jordan: Jonah Lincoln Best

Cinematography, Singapore: Chen Jie Xiao

Special Thanks: One of Many Studio; Sunrise Camp Wadi Rum

Confluence began during One of Many’s residency in Jordan in 2023. Drawing on the symbolism of water across language and landscape, I created the scroll using water-related words and phrases, then ceremonially unfurled it down a dune in the Wadi Rum desert to form an imagined “scroll river.” Flowing through an arid landscape, the work considers water as a force that exceeds political borders and connects otherwise distant lands, histories, and peoples.

The scroll was later installed at Gathering Future Ancestors in Brooklyn and at Art Omi Open Studios. These presentations shifted the work from a performed landscape into an architectural and memorial presence. When I first fully unrolled the scroll again after Wadi Rum, grains of desert sand were still caught within the paper, carrying physical traces of the site where it had first been activated.

The second performance followed the scroll to Singapore, my family’s home after generations of migration across Asia. I carried it through my family cemetery, unfurling sections across ancestral graves before wrapping the scroll around my body as a temporary shroud. The action draws on burial ritual and transforms the scroll from an imagined river into an object of mourning, protection, and ancestral memory.

This research now continues through I Dreamed of a River, an ongoing performance-documentary project currently in development.