NEW YORK, NY.- Visual artist and photographer Bai Song presented The Wall and NoWhere Specific in Latency, the Parsons MFA Photography 2026 Thesis Exhibition. The exhibition was on view through September 17, 2026, at the Galleries at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, located at 66 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY (entrance at 2 West 13th Street).
Working across photography, installation, artist books, and architectural materials, Song explores the relationship between temporary living spaces and the people who pass through them. Her work begins with a simple but unsettling observation: after someone leaves a room, the space can quickly be cleaned, repaired, repainted, and returned to an anonymous state. Yet the past does not disappear completely. It remains embedded in damaged surfaces, covered holes, faded marks, and other details that are often overlooked.
At the center of Song’s practice is the idea that people may not truly possess the spaces they inhabit. Instead, spaces temporarily hold their bodies, belongings, routines, and memories before passing into the lives of others.
In The Wall, Song transforms an ordinary building material into both an image-bearing surface and a sculptural object. The installation consists of two six-by-four-foot drywall panels positioned side by side and supported by concrete blocks. Photography is integrated into the structure, while the physical presence of the drywall evokes the walls of rented rooms, transitional homes, and interiors that are repeatedly altered by their occupants.
Drywall is generally expected to remain unnoticed. It is painted over and treated as a neutral background for domestic life. Song brings it forward as the subject of the work. The wall is no longer simply a support for photographs; it becomes a record of occupation, repair, concealment, and removal.
The installation refers to the familiar process of restoring a room after someone has moved out. Holes are filled, marks are covered, surfaces are sanded, and another layer of paint is applied. The room appears new again, but its blankness is constructed through repeated acts of erasure. Previous histories remain physically present beneath the finished surface, even when they can no longer be seen.
By placing the drywall panels on concrete blocks, Song also emphasizes the instability of the structure. The installation resembles a fragment of architecture that has been separated from the building it once belonged to. It stands like a temporary monument, but one made from fragile and replaceable materials. This tension between monumentality and impermanence reflects the uncertain status of memory itself: something can be preserved, concealed, damaged, and reconstructed at the same time.
Song’s artist book NoWhere Specific approaches similar questions through a quieter and more intimate form. Created from photographs made over several years in rooms where the artist lived, the book documents spaces that were once personally significant but are presented without clear geographical or biographical information.
Before photographing these interiors, Song removed many of the belongings that might reveal who lived there. The resulting rooms resist easy identification. Viewers cannot determine exactly where they are, when the photographs were made, or what occurred within them. Although every image comes from the artist’s own life, the spaces appear anonymous and could seemingly belong to anyone.
This deliberate absence of information is central to the work. Rather than reconstructing a complete autobiography, NoWhere Specific allows uncertainty to remain. Empty walls, worn surfaces, windows, corners, and traces of previous use become fragments of a story that cannot be fully recovered. Viewers are invited to enter these gaps with their own experiences of home, relocation, distance, and departure.
Together, The Wall and NoWhere Specific examine the boundary between personal memory and anonymous space. One work gives architectural weight to the traces left behind; the other uses sequence, distance, and omission to consider how a once-familiar room can gradually become unrecognizable. Both works ask what remains after a person leaves and whether an image can preserve an experience without fully explaining it.
Bai Song is a Chinese visual artist and photographer based in the United States. She is a 2026 MFA Photography candidate at Parsons School of Design and has lived and studied in the United States for nearly a decade. Her experience of inhabiting temporary spaces and moving between cultural environments informs her ongoing investigation of home, migration, memory, and belonging.
Through photography, installation, and artist books, Song focuses on partial visibility: the moment when something can still be felt but can no longer be completely known. Her work does not attempt to restore what has disappeared. Instead, it creates a space in which absence, material traces, and incomplete images can remain open to interpretation.
