RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING

Ripple Ripple Rippling has been working with Shigushan village, on the outskirts of Wuhan in China, since 2015. As a site of both labour supply and resource extraction, Shigushan’s life and landscape embody the social and ecological dependences embedded within China’s urbanisation.

Its villagers are part of the country’s almost 300 million rural migrant workforce, known as the floating population. These workers go to cities to work, leaving their ageing parents and young children behind; for more than 80% of families in rural China, the middle generation is missing. From tactics of dissolving their families and floating dynamically between cities and the home village emerges a practice of ‘rippling’—the formation of indeterminate yet resilient assemblages. These assemblages stretch spatially from house to territory, unfold temporally across daily to multi-year cycles, and manifest bodily in everyday dispositions.

The precarious livelihood of rural migrant workers is a temporary, transient state that has become part of a broader structure rather than an exception. While such state is at once the result of systemic inequality, subject to symbolic violence and self-imposed, RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING rejects flat victim narratives that often reinscribe marginalised communities as depleted and damaged.

Through a situated perspective focusing on the home village, the project attunes to how villagers make worlds, from the opportunistic reparation of scarred landscapes to networks of care that extend and transgress familial bonds. This attunement is grounded in a process-oriented method at the intersections of architecture, anthropology, filmmaking, and performance.

Over the past decade, Ripple Ripple Rippling has become a living project. From architectural documentation to participant observation to performative improvisation to collective happening, the project is a long-term commitment to a place, its marginalised community and their agency, resistance and complicity, all rooted in precarity.

LINKS

TALK Overview of the project

FILM TRILOGY
On the Margins
The Hall
Till Ashes Turn Into Pines

EXHIBITION
Ripple Ripple Rippling: 10-Year Review
Ripple Ripple Rippling: Drystone House Foundation
Prologue to Ripple Ripple Rippling
Scroll: Floating, Dissolving, Rippling
Scroll: Collective Forms in China

PUBLICATION
Structured Ambiguity: Scroll as Method, in AA Files 79, 2023.

Rippling: Towards Untamed Domesticity, in The Journal of Architecture, 2022

Collectivisation, Paradox, and Resistance: The Architecture of People’s Commune in China, in The Journal of Architecture, 2022

MEDIA
KoozArch interview: Ripple, Traces, Drifts: Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan on process-oriented practice, 2025

KoozArch column: Living with Precarity: #4 Situated Imaginaries, 2022

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Project team: Jingru (Cyan) Cheng & Chen Zhan in collaboration with Mengfan Wang

Our deepest gratitude goes to the villagers of Shigushan, who have opened their lives to us with generosity and trust.

The project has been awarded a Graham Foundation Production Grant (2024–25), following a Graham Foundation Research Grant (2022–23). The initial documentary phase was supported by the Driving the Human initiative (2021). Fieldwork between 2018 and 2019 was enabled by the Collective Forms in China project funded by the British Academy. The AA Wuhan Visiting School (2015–17), co-led by Sam Jacoby and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, was a collective effort in the research with the help of all the participating students and tutors, and received local support from Huazhong University of Science and Technology School of Architecture and Urban Planning, co-ordinated by Dean Professor Gangyi Tan.

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