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You may already have heard of it. The term has been circulating for several years now: Nyami—the Tibetan word for merfolk—is a fabricated urban legend conceived by Ge Tairan and Tenzin Dhame. Though openly fictional, Nyami has gradually assumed the peculiar life of folklore itself: many have heard of the duo's work, yet very few have encountered the exhibition firsthand.

The idea first emerged from the artists' observations of fish markets in Lhasa, where vendors casually refer to their fish simply as “Lhasa fish.” In a place where fish consumption was historically uncommon among Tibetans, the phrase opens onto wider histories of migration, tourism, and ecological introduction, including the spread of crucian carp and rainbow trout over recent decades. For the artists, it was precisely these ordinary, everyday encounters that opened up the possibility for Nyami to exist—somewhere between rumor, ecology, and speculation.

The exhibition brings together works developed by Ge Tairan and Tenzin Dhame over the past three years, drawing from historical photographs and field research gathered during their travels, and weaving them together with Tibetan pop songs and the ambient sounds of urban life. Rooted in the artists' personal audiovisual encounters, the exhibition attunes impressions from daily life to the intertwined histories of migration and environmental transformation across human and nonhuman worlds.

The exhibition moves through a series of contrasting sonic registers. Nyami's Landscape Studies and the adjacent dual-channel video Fish Banquet drift alongside the melodies and recited lyrics of beloved Tibetan pop classics, while elsewhere Urban Infrastructure Sounds adopts a more abrasive acoustic texture, pairing environmental recordings with Guide to Escaping Fish Pens—a thangka-inspired reportage mural tracing the ecological fallout of industrial rainbow trout farms on the Tibetan Plateau. Here, waters disturbed by industrial extraction become a field of ambiguous gestures, where the role of mythological beings remain elusive: are they guiding the escaped fish toward freedom, despite the ecological disorder their spread may bring, or attempting to hold them back? The possibility of another path remains suspended beneath the surface. Compared to the duo's earlier works, in which Nyami functioned largely as a fictional narrative device, the figure here no longer operates primarily as a character, but as a mode of perception—one attuned to the unstable terrain where landscape, infrastructure, ecology, and representation begin to dissolve into one another. The shift recalls the semantic drift of duende: once a folkloric goblin-like presence, later invoked as a name for artistic intensity and heightened sensibility.
Landscape, throughout the exhibition, remains an unstable category. A mountain, certainly. A river, perhaps. But also a hydropower ruin, a highland fish farm, the spectral trace of a Tang–Tibetan marriage alliance restaged in a 1962 historical drama, or Tsegon's sweeping migration ballad Aro Khampa drifting through worn cassette tapes. Landscape here is approached not as an idyllic view, but as a site of sedimentation, where ecological remnants, historical afterimages, and mediated memories settle unevenly into one another. In these gestures, Nyami recedes from view, lingering instead in the folds where infrastructure turns folkloric, melody absorbs extraction, and contact history drifts into resonance.


Text by Zian Chen


INSTALLATION VIEWS
ABOUT THE ARTIST

GE TAIRAN and TENZIN DHAME（葛泰然与旦增达美）


Ge Tairan (b. 2000, Anhui) and Tenzin Dhame (b. 1997, Lhasa), both graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (BA and MFA) and currently work in Beijing. As a collaborative duo, they are known for interdisciplinary and experimental practice that blend research with fiction to interrogate contemporary mythology and interethnic narratives. Their shared interest in cross-cultural and multispecies storytelling led to a nomination for the "E.A.T. Prize Annual Artist Award" in 2024.


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ABOUT THE CURATOR

Zian Chen（陈玺安）


Zian Chen is currently a contributing editor at Ocula Magazine. Recent curatorial projects include Ho Rui

An’s solo presentations in Shanghai at Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai (in collaboration
with Michelle Yeonho Hyun) and Vanguard Gallery (both 2025), as well as Dhame and Tairan’s earlier solo
exhibition at Hima Hima Gallery, Lhasa (2024). He has also contributed to exhibition catalogues for artists
and institutions including Hinrich Sachs, Elmgreen & Dragset, Ho Rui An, Ayoung Kim, Lafin Sawmah, Wang
Tuo, and Arrow Factory, among others.

MORE EXHIBITIONS

POLLINATORS AND PRIMORDIAL SOUP


Chen Menghan, Chen Duxi, Ge Tairan and Tenzin Dhame, Hugo Teixeira, Shang Ying, Wu Yumo

18 JUNE - 27 JULY 2025 GALLERY WHERE, BEIJING