Between Exposure and Shelter: Unequal Landscapes
2026.03.24 - 2026.03.29
Artist: Hua Shuchen
Curator: Carrie Wang
The connection between Shuchen Hua and flowers begins with a prolonged gaze. It is not about appreciation, nor about possession. Instead, in the interstices of urban life, flowers become a presence intimately aligned with personal experience—as a place of settling and also of resistance.
Flowers are at their most fragile when in full bloom. They stretch toward the light, simultaneously exposing themselves to the gaze. Their unfolding is not an act of display, but a manifestation shaped by boundaries. These boundaries reflect in the artist’s technique. The fast-drying nature of tempera prevents complete blending; each brushstroke is fixed in the moment it touches the surface, just like each gaze cannot be fully overwritten by the next. The canvas retains a status of Ongoing: the flower is not a static object, but one that continuously blossoms within each brushstroke.
Tempera’s indirectness makes it impossible to achieve the desired density in one single layer, requiring repeated glazing and shaping. This mirrors the artist’s relationship with the flowers—a rhythm of approaching and withdrawing. Each layer of color accumulates traces of time. The final image is not the result of coverage, but a record of time and attention interwoven. In each layer, flowers are both sheltered through repeated looking and increasingly exposed with each appearance.
Here, the window is no longer just a passage but becomes a cut. It extracts a fragment from an undefined world and names “landscape”. But landscape is never symmetrical. One side always bears greater visibility, while another is more fragile. The flower is protected indoors, while is positioned at the clearest point of sight—both guarded and watched. The artist repeatedly explores this delicate tension—how to maintain integrity between openness and restraint.
In a city of extreme transparency, privacy is already fragile. This inherent asymmetry is not conflict, but the natural tilt of relationships—between exposure and shelter, between the desire to be seen and the need to remain oneself.
Landscape thus emerges not in the distance, but in the interval between us and the flower.
