“The crowd is an illusion. It does not exist. I am talking to each of you.”
— Jorge Luis Borges

Borges’s remark denies the crowd as a coherent entity: understanding and communication never occur collectively, but always through singular encounters. From this premise, the exhibition avoids constructing a unified narrative from multiple practices. Each work remains irreducible, addressing the viewer not as part of a collective “we,” but as an individual presence.

In Shan Yuhan’s paintings, familiar scenes function less as sites of memory than as structures under examination. Childhood games, nocturnal fires, and unstable figures are reorganized into latent systems of order, competition, and self-discipline. Game reframes the act of musical chairs as an internalized logic of elimination—limited positions, surplus bodies, and agency gradually absorbed by rules. Whisper shifts this logic inward, where external authority transforms into persistent psychological interference. Fire simultaneously signals illumination and self-consumption. Shan does not resolve these tensions; instead, his figures remain suspended—neither redeemed nor extinguished—while rationality persists in a fragile, provisional form.

He Peijia’s practice centers on how images are perceived, remembered, and altered through everyday experience. Her subjects—bodily sensations, light, ordinary objects, animal gestures—appear as image fragments rather than complete narratives. These motifs operate as points where personal experience and cultural memory intersect and slide. Found imagery is retained yet reconfigured through tactile, linguistic, and literary inflections, allowing perception itself to become the site of the image. Meaning remains provisional, emerging through association and revision rather than closure. Her paintings sustain ambiguity, moving between individual sensation and shared memory without stabilizing interpretation.

Chang Guangying’s paintings revolve around a highly symbolic figure placed within spatial structures that resist equilibrium. The figure operates as an affective carrier rather than a narrative agent, shifting between falling, drifting, and suspension. Depth and focal coherence are deliberately weakened, leaving the narrative unresolved. In Dinner on the Grass, art-historical references are dismantled into relations of color, posture, and gaze. Historical imagery functions not as citation but as reusable visual structure. Through compositional displacement and the autonomous growth of color, the work sustains an open tension between desire, nature, and social regulation.

Zhang Yu’ang’s recent works engage “displacement” as an experiential condition shaped by overlap and misalignment rather than physical movement alone. Sunny to rainy / Rainy to sunny situates this instability within a specific yet indeterminate setting: a moving vehicle, a period-marked interior, and ambiguous weather. Displacement is articulated through shifts in viewpoint and pictorial structure. Earlier works from 2021 employ denser compositions and abstraction to reframe landscape as a field overlaid with historical, urban, and cultural fragments. From these operations emerges a “Private Airspace”—a mode of viewing in which narrative orientation is suspended and uncertainty becomes a deliberate strategy.

Li Baige’s paintings begin with carefully staged scenes but resist temporal progression, remaining fixed at moments that evade explanation. In Collective Narrative, overlapping faces and fragmented phrases form neither dialogue nor resolution, exposing the internal complexity of collective discourse. Staring at the Sun relocates symbols associated with outdoor leisure—sun loungers and sunglasses—into an interior setting. This displacement renders the gesture autonomous rather than situational. Sunglasses function as both physical and psychological filters, asserting the privacy of sensation. Through restrained figuration, Li constructs a space between reality and inner experience, where ordinary gestures quietly negotiate visibility, meaning, and self-positioning within social structures.