Just Beyond the Sight: Curated by WANG Yaoli

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to present Just Beyond the Sight, curated by WANG Yaoli, the group exhibition featuring over 30 recent works by nine artists, Rui CAO, Chiao CHU, Xinyu HAN, JIA Xinyu, Xiaohan JIANG, LIN Long, Xinran LIU, Wenyi QIAN, and Ziyi ZHOU.

In the context of contemporary art, "innocence" is not a term that is frequently discussed. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau viewed innocence as a state of purity uncorrupted by societal civilization and emphasized the necessity of preserving it. In civilized societies, individuals are bound by rules, laws, and morals, losing their autonomy over their natural instincts. Innocence, in contrast, symbolizes unrestrained freedom and independence. Rousseau argued that innocence is not a primitive state but a higher moral ideal.

Hovering between authenticity and artifice, "innocence," a symbol of purity and nature, has always been a critical tool for creators in their resistance against the realities of experience. In the face of a contemporary society filled with contradictions and uncertainties, artists often use ambiguous and polysemous language to express their personal experiences, responding to the complexities of social realities. Whether consciously interpreting individual identity or sensory experiences, creating instant works in response to their states, or drawing inspiration from a memory that has been awakened in the present, artists are often accompanied by a sense of "innocence" in their creative process. They enjoy searching for hidden variables within established rules and orders, tend to create undiscovered secret realms through bodily experiences rather than fixed facts, and place greater trust in their "uncontaminated" intuition and the ideal of returning to nature.

Through nine artists' works, this exhibition explores the diverse possibilities of rediscovering innocence after experience and reflection. Rui CAO and Xinyu HAN record fleeting moments of events. Rui CAO's work focuses on animals as her primary subject, constructing intimate and personal perspectives on canvas to capture the frozen moments illuminated by a flash. This creates a narrative tension that is both brutal and humorous. In the "half-second blank" of the flash, a sense of privacy is disrupted, intertwining the startled reactions of the photographed subjects with the voyeuristic experience of the audience, forming a transient state of emptiness and vacuum. The audience witnesses both raw cruelty and awkward humor, as her skillfully integrates privacy and conflict into her art through soft visual language and dramatic framing. Unlike CAO's captured moments of stillness, Xinyu HAN's works resemble frames from a video, connecting the past, present, and future. Her creations focus on expressing the potential possibilities of the "next second" on a static canvas, evoking a sense of unease in viewers while simultaneously filling them with anticipation for what comes next. She strives to create "motion" within the stillness of her canvases, often drawn to exploring the hidden dualities in urban life. HAN skillfully employs contrasts of light and shadow, broad swaths of color, and delicate brushwork to depict surface-level oppositions, such as light versus dark and hard versus soft. At the same time, she delves into the gray areas within these contrasts, examining the complexities beyond binary choices.

JIA Xinyu's works are inspired by poetry, ancient traditional painting, and sensory experiences. Her creations revolve around "space," "relationships," and the "unknown," with easel painting as the primary medium. She explores the subtle and blurred "gaps" between humanity and the world through mysterious and poetic expressive language. Her works often start with everyday "scenes," but are not content with simply reproducing visible reality. Instead, she delves into the ambiguous state between objects and reality and brings hidden drama and mystery into view. She attempts to reveal the unknown and poetic aspects hidden in life, inviting the audience to find their own "truth" amidst uncertainty. Similarly guided by "synesthesia," Xiaohan JIANG, who also draws inspiration from "synesthesia" in her creations, finds her inspiration in childhood memories spent in nature. Like the ancient cave paintings that record dreams, her work is simple and serene, yet carries a primitive and divine aesthetic. JIANG's artistic language is highly symbolic, but she does not intentionally assign complex metaphorical meanings to these symbols. She enjoys experimenting with different fabrics to create, guided primarily by intuition, capturing the moment's emotions. She expresses a simple and tranquil emotion through materials and sensory expression. She uses different fabrics, such as velvet and organza, and her works often feature special treatments for these materials. This preference stems from her fascination with handmade craftsmanship and the tactile quality of materials, giving her paintings a rich sense of texture visually and tactically.

Xinran LIU's work intentionally pursues the feeling of lightness, resembling stream-of-consciousness writing based on emotions and memories. She captures the flow of memories and imagination within self-awareness, creating compositions that oscillate between figuration and abstraction through fragmented narratives and non-linear structures. Her paintings return to the purity of imagery, avoiding excessive focus on the purpose of creation and instead emphasizing the expressiveness and communicative power of the artwork itself, rather than the depicted objects and their implicit meanings. Through painting, she explores the profound connections between individual consciousness and time, emotions, and memory, while capturing fleeting dynamic moments from everyday life. The transformation between figuration and abstraction is also an inseparable part of Wenyi QIAN's works. With an open mindset, she explores various media, including painting, writing, sculpture, performance, and installation, constantly seeking diverse forms to express personal thoughts and corporeal experiences. Inspired by elements like Indian sculptures of Buddha, butterfly migrations, and Chinese landscape paintings, her latest works internalize the imagery of "the body,"transforming it into emotions and textures. Using abstract lines and color blocks, she amplifies her sensory experiences, emphasizing repetition and rhythm with highly saturated colors to convey her unique perception of time and space.

When "innocence" is no longer synonymous with authenticity but becomes a reproduction of reality, it reveals the complexity of the social realities behind it. In Chiao CHU's works, humans, animals, and plants are placed in a shared space imbued with a sense of fiction. They exist independently and in a tense entanglement, forming an indescribable symbiosis and conflict. This arrangement is not a representation of reality but rather a fabrication created through collage and fiction, producing a strange and familiar context, thereby exposing contemporary individuals' deep inner contradictions. The creations of LIN Long and Ziyi ZHOU stem from genuine reflections on their personal life experiences. 

However, their approaches differ. LIN Long explores the predicaments of identity, emotion, and the life cycle within the context of modernity through a series of symbolic imagery and formalized shaping. The elements in her work—whether symbolic plants, personal identities, or metaphors for life—express her profound reflections on the relationship between the individual and society. At the same time, they carry complex narratives about the challenges of individual existence, emotional detachment, and self-reconstruction in modern society. In contrast, Ziyi ZHOU's work focuses more on expressing personal experiences. Deeply influenced by her childhood memories, she uses painting to articulate her inner emotions and memories. Her works are rich in strong symbolism and possess a distinctive personal significance. Elements such as building blocks, clocks, and flowers depict her inner world, encompassing imagery of safety, waiting, desire, and danger. From the childlike spontaneity of innocence-inspired graffiti to a fusion of figuration and abstraction, her work displays a unique, whimsical, deeply melancholic narrative space that merges childlike intuition with profound emotional depth.