FABRICE HYBER

The narrative of L’Éponge qui pleure (The Weeping Sponge) originates from artist Fabrice Hyber’s creative resonance with his late close friend, the landscape architect Yu Kongjian, and his “Sponge City” theory. In Yu’s vision, the land is not a rigid, tamed surface, but a breathing, living organism. Through autonomous coordination and long-term infiltration between water and soil, the earth’s lost elasticity is reclaimed. Flood management shifts from the violence of dam-based confrontation toward the inclusivity of marshland symbiosis. Cities are thus empowered to absorb and transform impacts like sponges, reshaping a defensive instinct that aligns with the rhythms of nature.

Fabrice Hyber describes himself as a sponge. Thirty years ago, the artist initiated an experiment on agricultural possibilities across a hundred hectares in Vendée: while preserving the original topography of the riverbanks, he practiced low-intensity planting, farming, and livestock rearing, established water systems in the valleys, and sowed new seeds in continuous response to the changing climate. In the reciprocity of monsoons and rainfall, the body’s permeability and the valley collectively sense every inch of moisture and time’s infiltration. Labor and ecological metabolism merge, allowing Hyber’s practice to intersect with Yu Kongjian’s “Sponge City” philosophy across different latitudes. Though a landscape is a result of human creation, its ultimate vitality lies in knowing when to cease intervention.

The paintings presented in this exhibition are more than a documentation of this valley; they are a realization and shared testimony of “terrestrial spontaneity” (or “the spontaneity of the earth”) derived from the mutual exploration of nature by Hyber and Yu Kongjian.