Those who flow in the body also wander in the city. Let it go, leave it behind.
2025.03.01 - 2025.04.06
Artist: Chen Keru, Nie Wenhui, Santiago Llanos, Sun Yihan
Curator: Leslie DONG
Cub_ism_ Artspace is pleased in collaboration with artists Chen Keru, Nie Wenhui , Santiago Llanos and Sun Yiihan, presents the spring exhibition from 1 March 2025 to 6 April 2025 ‘Those who flow in the body also wander in the city. Let it go, leave it behind.’
Chen Keru’s practice multiple media - painting, sculpture, collage, fiction, poetry, sound and stop-motion animation. This exhibition focuses on her abstract paintings and installations. The artist admits that she ‘once didn't know how to create abstract paintings’ until one day she heard a spiritual call and immediately bought a plane ticket the next day to fly back to her country, venturing into the mountains and ancient monuments without any preconceived ideas. She bent down to try her hand at painting in remote temples where incense was no longer in full bloom, and in the tunnels of museums - she saw abstraction in subtle ancient sculptures and figurative frescoes; beside her, people kneeling in reverence murmured, and the ancient statues of the gods and goddesses on their pedestals were silent.
‘Abstract 1’ was the first painting the artist created after returning to London, and it was from that moment on that she realised that something fluid had quietly passed through her body, and that she suddenly “knew” how to paint abstractly.
For Keru, the creation of different media is by no means isolated; for her, it is the works that inspire the works - the works of each medium inspire each other to form her snowballing chain of creation - and the boundaries are fused together to become one big world. Her installations are made from the ‘excess’ of daily work, and the process of collecting these fragmented objects, which have lost their original properties, can also be said to be like collecting a lot of scattered brushstrokes, which the artist uses to put together glyphs, form her words, create her sentences, and speak her words, so that a language is formed, and so that consciousness begins to flow.
Nie Wenhui's creations juxtapose animals and people, however not advocate or glorify idyllic pastoralism. Generally speaking, the characteristics of animals are nothing more than a projection of human concepts when they are confronted with them, like a magic mirror, into which people look but always see themselves and what they want to see. In the artist's paintings, the old horse snuggling with its owner, the long-billed bird lying on the sofa at the feet of the naked woman, the white rabbit standing on the roof and looking into the distance ...... The state of the animals in the paintings has somehow intruded into the lives of human beings too much, and the boundaries between human beings and nature have been blurred. The artist presents the connection and separation between human beings on a cultural and emotional level through the careful arrangement of the scenes.
Santiago Llanos has always followed the rule of ‘Adventure Painting’: he goes out of his studio and wanders randomly in the city - if we compare the city to a huge body, with underground tunnels as its veins, reinforced concrete as its bones, and neon signs alternating day and night as its breath, then the artist uses his own body as a medium to try to feel its resonance with the city, but this has already gone beyond the traditional paradigm of outdoor sketching.
At a time when digital media and AI are gradually taking over the huge body of the city, Santiago uses this intervention to ask it - where does the so-called ‘real world’ begin and end? The people, events, objects and the environment that the artist encountered in the course of his journey are no longer important; instead, he pays more attention to the metabolites left behind by this gigantic body as it breathes in and out - the artist turns the readymade objects that he searches for into platforms for his creation, and when these fragments of the real world are transformed into frames of images, the traces of his self-writing are engraved into his works. The recorded picture is just his feelings and imagination in the moment when he encounters the ‘real world’ by chance.
Sun Yihan physically ‘cuts’ the conventional picture through the shaped frame, forcing the viewer to accept a restricted perspective. This kind of compulsory visual path planning seems to be in order but is actually disordered. The long, narrow, pipelike images are randomly divided by the artist, and the information between the images is not even closely related to each other, and the figurative content flows at this moment, swallowing up the effective information. In this state of dislocated viewing, people have to try their best to grasp the fragmented parts and think and imagine about them - although the artist tries to establish some kind of ‘readability’ in his works, the viewer's subjective consciousness and experience will ultimately replace the artist's expression — This contradictory state is also the real state of life.
The ‘body’ and the ‘city’ can be seen as two ends of a metaphorical continuum - The former is destined to become a container and evidence when time or something else flows by; the latter is constantly trying to erase traces, to solidify or to transcend. What flows between the two? Let's say, there's a pine tree, maybe a lake or a lively neighbourhood, summer passes, summer comes again, there seems to be no difference; but when you look closely, and more clearly, you're surprised to see that the flow has blurred boundaries until they dissolve; you think of someone else or something else in the world, and you think that they are reborn under the same sky, in a renewed time or thing. Then you think of yourself and feel something flowing through you - so you blurt out,
‘Let it go / leave it behind.’
