MA Jun × ZHONG Yisi: How Soon the Distance, How Far the Wait: Curated by GAO Yumeng
BONIAN SPACE will launch its final exhibition before the Chinese New Year, How Soon the Distance, How Far the Wait, on January 18, 2025. Curated by GAO Yumeng, the duo exhibition will run through March 2, 2025.
This exhibition is a renewed collaboration between BONIAN SPACE and Ma Jun after a year's hiatus. Along with a new series of pencil works on paper, the show will also prominently display nearly ten of the artist's recent oil paintings on canvas. Ma Jun demonstrates a compelling affinity for exploring diverse mediums, eschewing predetermined outcomes in favor of a process-driven approach. Her brush is guided by a keen perception of the quotidian and the spontaneous currents of consciousness, transforming the act of creation into a voyage—a journey to explore the tangible external world while simultaneously measuring the interior rhythms of life.
With senses acutely attuned, Ma Jun engages with her surroundings as if dredging up fragments of lived experience from the depths of consciousness. The cadence of music, the respiration of nature, the sensations of the body, the poetry inherent in the everyday, and even fleeting moments as ephemeral as dust devils on the plains, are all transmuted under her hand into nuanced emotions and sensibilities. These are then articulated through the brushstrokes, composition, palette, content, and narrative structures of her paintings. At times, her expressions are as sharp as a blade, at others, as gentle as a caress, weaving the artist’s personal insights and revelations into the vast expanse of her inner world, before integrating them into the realm of universal concerns. In this way, Ma Jun opens up the construction and interpretation of meaning to the viewer, inviting a dialogue that resonates with a more authentic and profound world.
Concurrently, this exhibition marks Zhong Yisi's debut solo presentation in Beijing, showcasing her "Fragments of Old Memories" series—a suite of works executed on paper using mixed water-based media. In this body of work, Zhong embarks on an introspective journey, revisiting the depths of her consciousness to capture fleeting, ephemeral emotions and the aura of bygone objects, thereby constructing a corridor of autobiographical imagery. Employing the fluidity, transparency, and serendipitous nature of water-based materials, complemented by a nuanced palette of low-saturation colors, she delineates the hazy and ambiguous contours of time with a delicate interplay of presence and absence.
Against a decolorized backdrop, mottled and faded vessels, lusterless glass glazes, and timeworn animal specimens stand in silent repose. These objects, imbued with the echoes of past recollections, undergo a personal translation and reconstruction, transforming into catalysts for awakening unconscious memories. Like phantoms of time adrift in the river of consciousness, they collide and coalesce, ultimately flowing quietly into the depths of time, where they converge with the self of yesteryear.
As the year draws to a close, and the tide of memories swells, perhaps it is time to shift our gaze from the incessant scrutiny and interrogation of systems and the totality, and instead, to focus on the individual. For each independent artistic life, the sustained act of creation itself becomes a transformation of the unanswerable pursuit of endpoints and solutions into an enduring inquiry into existence. It is in the daily labor that fragments of meaning are sought, and in the long passage of time that one awaits the serendipitous echoes from the depths of time.
Like casting a pebble, a thread, or a drop of ink into the vortex of life, these acts gradually transform into a flowing, accumulating, and diffused inner force within the endless gyre of time, nourishing the very fabric of existence. Each turn and overlap expands into new depths and breadths, ultimately converging with the richness and complexity of being. The journey itself, then, becomes the very essence of arrival.
