“Too Late to Fade” grows out of Deborah FISCHER’s residency with Rong Design Library and her encounters with artisans, workshops, rural and urban landscapes across China. In Xinchang and Gaoqiao, two historic towns within Shanghai’s Pudong district, she photographed walls marked by humidity, repairs, repainting and daily life — surfaces that act as living archives of climate and human intervention. In Jingdezhen, she encountered another form of persistence: porcelains once judged imperfect were deliberately broken to prevent their circulation, yet their fragments remain in the soil, reappearing through excavations and along riverbanks. From this tension between rupture and survival, FISCHER collected workshop debris, production remnants and discarded materials, from fragments presented as antiques to contemporary factory rejects.

The installation combines suspended textile panels and glass works. Photographs of Shanghai’s disappearing walls are printed on synthetic fabric and reworked in Changsha through Xiang embroidery. Silk stitching follows, interrupts or extends cracks, stains and eroded surfaces rather than covering or restoring them. Hand embroidery, synthetic fabric and industrial overlocking coexist, revealing how craft knowledge and manufacturing processes adapt and continue without losing their distinct logics.

Produced with GONG Kehai in Jingdezhen, the glass works transform collected ceramic shards, baskets, metal mesh, wood and workshop debris through blowing, imprinting and surface treatments. Most objects came from residents of Qingshan Village near Hangzhou, often from outdoor domestic spaces; others were recovered from local waste sites. Rather than simply preserving them, glass carries these objects into another material state.

Built through layers of walls, objects, gestures, places and hands, Too Late to Fade affirms that materials and memories do not disappear: even broken, displaced or transformed, they continue to testify otherwise.