Behind the Scene, Behind the Thing
2025.04.12 - 2025.05.31
Artist: Katharina Reinsbach, Li Qinyang, Qian Ningyue, Yuan Shu
Curator: Wang Haoyang
Cub_ism_ Artspace will present the group exhibition Behind the Scene, Behind the Thing featuring artists Katharina Reinsbach, Li Qinyang, Qian Ningyue, and Yuan Shu, the exhibition will be hold from April 12 to May 31, 2025. The "frontstage" offers an initial impression, yet artists’ artworks often reveal more behind the scenes: their secondary self-expressions or latent narratives. Do objects truly embody their original forms? Common materials, reworked by artists, transform into emotional signifiers. Behind the thing, these materials seem to acquire a second life, becoming vessels for memories or emotional symbols.
Language also operates as a sign system for exchanging information and emotions. Yet it transcends singular linguistic structures; through artistic lenses, it morphs into diverse symbolic translations. Though the four artists hail from distinct backgrounds, their works converge in this exhibition to probe shared themes. Each piece bears subtle traces of time and environment, constructing individual "signifying systems" that explore self-hood and cultural roots.
The viewer might dissect the works through the lens of linguistic structure (langue) and speech (parole). While themes like "family" or "identity" remain constant (parole), each artist’s chosen media and materials — their langue — reconfigure these concepts. For instance, Li Qinyang places a family photograph inside an open mussel shell, occupying its most tender and precious cavity. Without elaborate narration, the image’s emotional gravity resonates instantly. Her work transcends mere storytelling, instead weaving imperceptible connections to fleeting moods and atmospheres.
The signified is neither mental representation nor tangible object but the dicible — the expressible. Artistic methods themselves become signs. Qian Ningyue employs dough, a material rooted in her culinary heritage. As her life migrated across geographies, the familiar rituals of cooking persisted, creating a structural isomorphism between societal environment and the body. Dough — malleable and formless — mirrors the inseparable, often subconscious "fusion" of memory and emotion. When baked, its visual and olfactory interplay immerses viewers in her crafted spatial narratives.
Yuan Shu scales the signified from micro to macro. In her series Hui Bi Xiao Xing ("Those Tiny Stars"), recurring motifs of horses and oxen symbolize the ceaseless striving of individual selves. The titular verse — "Those tiny stars, scattered east in threes and fives" — evokes itinerant beings adrift in bustling solitude. Her work Incense and Fire (香火) interrogates China’s ancestral rites, a cultural tether binding diasporic individuals to familial roots. Using organic materials and weaving techniques, Yuan imbues her pieces with tactile warmth through repetitive braiding and caressing, forging a unique symbolic language.
Artist Katharina Reinsbach expands her visual lexicon through spatial interventions. She rescales smartphone snapshots — often domestic scenes — onto canvases, processed with a vintage photo blur to evoke half-remembered moments. In her Stretch series, bodies occupy restless angles and postures against vast emptiness, staging an ambivalent dialogue between figure and pictorial space. Are these forms asserting their presence, or constrained by the edges of representation?
