Granularity: Aligning…
The exhibition revolves around “The Moment of Escape—Residual Drift, Pulses, and Crossings,” “Exercises in Alignment—Endless Reflection, Identity, and Enigmas,” “Waves of Control—The Perpetually Online Mental Protocol,” and “Grains of Discipline—The Ultimate Topology of Body and Time,” presenting the artists' multifaceted responses to urban rhythms, operational mechanisms, value exchange, fast-moving consumer desires, algorithmic systems, individual perception, and collective dilemmas.
01 Chapter One
The Moment of Escape—Residual Drift, Pulses, and Crossings
An unconscious swipe of the fingertip, a fleeting blank stare, a wisp of wind passing through the gap between buildings… The city teaches us, through a precise grammar, how to fill our time, yet never tells us that a moment of distraction is also a necessary breath. The artistic practices in this chapter attempt to recalibrate their own rhythms within the cracks of the system, forming the exhibition's most authentic live experience.
Title: Faded Leaves
Artist: Tang Guo
Medium: Hemp paper, plant fibers, 73 cm x 96 cm
Using hemp paper and plant fibers as its medium, this work—resembling fragments weathered by time—captures the subtle state of natural objects as they hover between disappearance and preservation. The artist breaks down plant fibers and reshapes them to evoke the texture and grain of ancient, weathered leaves, revealing a serene yet profound beauty of decay. This work embodies Tang Guo’s ongoing focus on “lost objects”—those everyday items eroded by time yet still bearing traces of their existence.
Title: On the Prairie
Artist: Tang Guo
Medium: mixed media with plant fibers on linen, 200 cm x 200 cm
Through the integrated use of plant fibers on linen, the composition evokes the vastness and primal power of the earth. The interwoven texture of the fibers forms a “prairie" brimming with vitality, while the natural folds and undulations of the material resemble topographic contour lines, symbolizing the earth as the foundation of all existence. Tang Guo believes that “fibers exist just as the earth exists”; this work is a powerful expression of that simple conviction, embodying the artist's reflection on the essence of existence through his materials.
Title: Rainbow Symmetry
Artist: Chen Fenwan
Medium: Wood panels, carved paper, acrylic paint
Colorful, densely arranged blocks of paper-cut art surround the textural composition to form a portrait. Through a layered rendering technique, the artist places herself and those around her in a position where they gaze intently at one another.
This work explores the theme of "symmetry." Building on the characteristic of paper-cutting—which relies on folding to achieve basic symmetry—Chen Fenwan has consistently regarded "symmetry" as her primary research topic in her recent creative work and scholarship, offering new interpretations at each stage. In her view, "symmetry" has meanings beyond the visual; it symbolizes actions or dynamic relationships that function as verbs: our bodies, our lives, time, and the emotional bonds between people are all "symmetrical."
Title: Untitled: The Ravages of War #4
Artist: Zuo Tian Dong Ding (Steven Zuo)
Medium: Resin, quartz sand, 3D-printed PVC, stainless steel, LED display, glass, 330 cm x 230 cm x 150 cm
Motivated by “rhizome”-style thinking, the artist explores how contemporary subjectivity emerges from the interplay of technology, society, culture, and politics, spreading outward to construct its “contextual” reality. The pauses and blank spaces in daily life, combined with his wanderings through diverse cultures, prompt him to interpret our “reality” through a humorous lens, drawing on a myriad of social events; he navigates through layers of cultural “sediments,” unearthing micro-histories hidden from the public eye.
Title: Fatal Attraction
Artist: Zhang Chi
Medium: Luxury fabrics, lace, ribbons, brooches, foam board, 100 cm x 100 cm
The moment a piece of fabric is taken off the shelves at the Guangzhou Fabric Wholesale Market, it ceases to be merely a “textile raw material” and becomes a cultural symbol that embodies the consumption trends of the times. Leveraging the geographical advantage of his studio’s proximity to Guangzhou’s largest fabric wholesale market, artist Zhang Chi transforms the “luxury fabrics” unique to this region into a creative language, constructing a series of highly dynamic 2.5-imensional installations.In this city, where “manufacturing” and “distribution” are in its DNA, Zhang Chi’s work naturally carries the symbolic significance imbued by the region; within the texture of every inch of fabric lies the complex interplay between industrial networks and consumer markets.
02 Chapter Two
Exercises in Alignment—Endless Reflection, Identity, and Enigmas
When OKRs and daily reports become a form of self-discipline, every reflection is an opportunity to reset oneself. When individuals are repeatedly pulled back to the system's preset standards, what exactly are we gaining—and what are we sacrificing? Here, art plays the role of an observer, prompting people to pause and examine the value judgment system internalized to the very marrow of their being—to see how those unquestioningly accepted rules gradually settle into common sense within both body and mind.
Title: I Divide My Body into Pixel Fragments and Share Them with You（No. 12/No. 19/No. 07/No. 22）
Artist: Jiang Heng
Medium: 10 layers of imported wood panels, acrylic, pencil, canvas
Jiang Heng’s creative process is constituted by the material intervention of the act of “viewing.” Moving from “landscape” to “matter,” this represents a “turn toward encapsulation” in visual gaze and painting. Faced with Jiang Heng’s meticulous refinement and construction of media and materials, the public no longer merely gazes at objects from the outside—viewing the landscape—but instead perceives the true and complex structure of the “landscape” from within, through multiple dimensions such as media, materials, time, and perspective.
In Jiang Heng’s work, landscapes are no longer merely “seen”; instead, they become acts of layering and refraction. Through his exploration of the “materiality of time,” he has developed an “archaeology of seeing.” While constructing visual landscapes, he seems to be asking: What is the reality behind the data? Is a “landscape” the reality of nature, a product of technology, or a phantom of memory?
Title: Residents Series
Artist: Chen Xiaoguo
Medium: Oil on canvas
Chen Xiaoguo’s practice centers on painting as his primary medium, viewing it as an act—a process of ruminating on and reinterpreting everyday images. In his view, the images people encounter daily are the result of a collusion between the media and content producers, and his paintings serve to capture and expose this reality. Using portraits as his entry point, he selects images from both the internet and real life, aiming to create a boundless atlas of humanity. By imbuing these images with bright yet ambiguous tones, he employs a “soft aesthetic” to craft an inclusive visual atmosphere, allowing his paintings to achieve visual equality through the allure of the gaze—ensuring that his subjects, whether sublime or ordinary, “inhabit” the canvas on equal footing.
Title: In the Cracks
Artist: Liu Lingshan
Medium: Resin, 50 cm x 25 cm x 15 cm
The landscape of “urban villages” is a common sight in the urbanization process of China’s coastal regions. In these villages, buildings stand closely side by side, stacked and intertwined, squeezing the sky. Such structures are sometimes jokingly referred to as “handshake buildings.” Though seemingly utterly illogical, these spaces are imbued with a dynamic, ever-changing vitality—they are the very spaces that give birth to the present and the future. Thus, the artist attempts to crystallize the space between these “handshake buildings” into an abstract architectural form, drawing attention to the limited breathing room and latent illusions that exist within this “crack.”
Title: Phaneron 2
Artist: Liu Tianming
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, 175 cm x 175 cm
Title: Unfolding and Folding
Artist: Liu Tianming
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, 25 cm x 25 cm x 4 cm
The artist is a contemporary artist specializing in abstract painting and conceptual art. His work blends glitch art, conceptual art, and abstract painting, aiming to explore “art as a visualized concept.” Through simulations of high-resolution pixels and experiments with acrylic on linen, he constructs a visual language that straddles the line between painting and digital imagery—his works are characterized by geometric “squares,” “diamonds,” and the “Electronic” series, preserving a perspective of subjective expression within rational deduction. His creative philosophy is deeply influenced by digital technology and the information age, probing the dialectical relationship between the visual and reality.
Title: Weave Shadows
Artist: Yu Qian
Medium: Handwoven fabric, ramie, loofah, 265 cm x 70 cm (3 works)
The artist, who began her career as a fashion designer, uses everyday manual labor—such as touching and sewing—as her creative method, materializing and preserving her genuine emotions and life memories, stitch by stitch, within the traces of her handiwork and the specific materials she uses; this approach liberates art from the aesthetic barriers of elite circles, returning it to tactile and emotional experiences that ordinary people can perceive and relate to, making art a “tangible, warm” presence rather than an aesthetic symbol reserved exclusively for the elite.
03 Chapter Three
Waves of Control — The Perpetually Online Mental Protocol
Alignment, synchronization, iteration, closed-loop...these have become the underlying protocols of the mind, running in the background like an operating system—so much so that we don't even realize we've long been living according to this code. Artists use imagery to create uncertainty within order; through installations, they question how technology reshapes human existence; and by dismantling and reassembling everyday objects, they reveal a kind of internal noise through their collisions in absurd contexts.
Title: Training Camp No. 1: Transcending Oneself
Artist: Zhou Xiaohu
Medium: Video, Film (8-channel video installation)
Vecchi’s work is positioned “between sculpture and painting.” This is particularly evident in the “Formaunica” series. He began creating the plaster sculptures in this series in 2017. Vecchi adds color to the plaster as he prepares it, which reveals his creative approach: the material is subordinated to the experience of color. Color serves as a bridge between painting and sculpture, breathing life into the sculptures.
Title: A History of Violence
Artist: Ash Zing
Medium: Bead Curtain, 200 cm x 300 cm
Ash Zing uses iron fences—depicting spear-like bladed weapons—to collide with beaded curtains, highlighting the fact that violence and isolation are ubiquitous in both physical and psychological spaces, yet often go unnoticed. Fences have long served as defensive structures in warfare and later evolved into rigid physical barriers used to demarcate public and private spaces. Since the modern era, iron fences have taken on decorative functions in addition to their practical ones, with many featuring designs inspired by spear-like bladed weapons, floral motifs, and geometric patterns. Bead curtains are a common type of flexible partition used in private spaces.
Title: Planet No. 33 / No. 18
Artist: Yang Xin
Medium: Bluestone / Sandstone, 37 cm x 30 cm x 35 cm
The “Planet” series features solid blocks of bluestone polished into nearly perfect spheres, with their surfaces carved to resemble the craters and ring-shaped valleys left by meteorite impacts, transforming a single rock into a “planet” that can be touched. Around the middle of the sphere, artist Yang Xin has carved a continuous band of “ruins” featuring corridors and vaulted arches—these ruins, built upon devout faith and willpower, are compressed and placed upon the planet, pointing to humanity’s imagination of “eternity.” The work reminds us that Earth, too, is an ancient stone; the elements within us share the same origin as those of the rock. The insignificance of the individual coexists with its inner vastness. Every person from the past and future—whether small or grand, ordinary or great—is a serene flower blooming in this eternally silent universe.
Title: Accurate Bias
Artist: Qian Lili
Medium: 1-Minute Installation Video
In this work, the artist’s own index finger replaces the second hand of a clock, with the flesh-and-blood finger rotating at a constant speed in strict sync with the mechanical markings. Standardized timepieces represent objective, uniform rules of measurement and inherently carry an invisible order that disciplines daily life; the personalized finger, as a physical symbol of judgment and identification, stands in contrast to the cold machinery. Through the “precisely operating fleshly pointer,” the work dialectically elucidates the core of its title: human cognition often forms a logically consistent and extremely rigorous system of judgment, yet this inherent accuracy stems precisely from the obsessions and biases born of the individual’s limited perspective; by intervening in the standardized time machine with the human body, the artist gives tangible form to the invisible disciplinary forces of time hidden beneath the clock face, reflecting on the human condition as it is swept along by the inertia of ingrained cognitive patterns.
04 Chapter Four
Grains of Discipline — The Ultimate Topology of Body and Time
From clocking in to working overtime, from grid-like workstations to the cycle of KPIs, this system of control fragments people into measurable units. Beneath a surface that appears light, minimalist, and even beautiful, the body is undergoing rigorous standardization. Here, art strives to salvage the internal and external experiences of individuals and groups. Those postures drilled into muscle memory—and bodily sensations obscured by labels such as “professional,” “efficient,” and “career-oriented”—are re-examined and repositioned by art, enabling viewers to perceive themselves through observation.
Title: Rubik's Cube, Everyday Poses, Pool, Deep Well
Artist: Cao Zaifei
Medium: Oil on canvas
Cao Zaifei’s paintings depict figures, animals, still lifes, and landscapes in a manner that is both repetitively monotonous and soberly somber. He consistently sets up narrative or dramatic scenarios within his compositions, obscuring the truth that lies behind the curtain. Although he pays little heed to the so-called “stickiness” of traditional oil painting and deliberately omits frontal depictions of figures—instead always portraying them from behind or as a pair of visible or invisible hands and feet manipulating our present and future— yet upon closer inspection, one discovers that no genuine logical thread can be found in his “fictitious” real-world scenes; or rather, he offers more of the indescribable absurdity, suspense, and baffling enigmas that exist in the sunlight, creating an absurd dislocation in his work: seemingly real, yet in fact fictional.
Title: “Loading...” Series, See Through the Peephole, Popular with Women, Let go
Artist: Wang Weijue
Medium: Needle-punched Wool Felt
Wang Weijue’s signature artistic language lies in the inherent contradiction between materials and action: she uses wool—which appears soft and harmless—yet creates her works through the violent act of repeated stabbing—thousands upon thousands of times—using wet felting and needle felting techniques. This process resembles a ritualized form of physical labor—the sharp needle blades pierce the fibers time and again, leaving dense traces of needle holes, as if the skin were being repeatedly pierced. Yet the final result is a fluffy, charming “fabric” with a deceptively alluring visual appeal; beneath its minimalist geometric forms and pastel hues lies the pain and oppression inherent in the manufacturing process.
Through the interweaving of mixed media—including wool, lace, tulle, beaded strands, minerals, and animal hides—she transforms the body into fabric, skin into landscape, and organs into containers, thereby expanding the discourse on the boundaries between the body and power. Her work focuses on the possession and absence of power within female gender roles, paying particular attention to the bodily discipline and psychological trauma concealed beneath everyday adornments and sweet-looking facades.
Title: The Tragedy of the Machine
Artist: Group 01(Liang Lianxi, Chen Rongbin)
Medium: Robotic Installation, 50 cm x 100 cm (3 pieces)
The Tragedy of the Machine uses robotic installations as a medium to explore the boundaries between technology and humanity. The artist collective proposes a creative concept of “externalizing” the body and continues to collaborate with scientific laboratories and digital institutions to explore the human condition in the context of virtual technology.
The work thus unfolds a discussion about desire and machines. It has been said that the human body is a machine: human desires drive the machine's operation, and the body's endless generation of desires gives rise to an equal amount of needs, ultimately leading to the concept of the “Seven Deadly Sins.” So, when robots—like humans—give birth to endless needs to satisfy their own desires, will they develop their own “original sin”? And when the needs of robots conflict with those of humans, will a struggle—or even a war—break out?
Title: The Eye of the Pineal Gland
Artist: Group 01( Liang Lianxi, Chen Rongbin)
Medium: Aluminum alloy, resin, electronic components, etc., 39 cm x 19 cm x 15 cm (2 works)
The design of the eyes is inspired by the human pineal gland, with a screen embedded within the pupil that displays AI-generated dream imagery. As the gland that regulates the circadian rhythm, the pineal gland opens the hidden door to consciousness through the secretion of melatonin; the mechanical eyelids close periodically, recreating the visions experienced during sleep cycles—much like the ancient metaphor of the pineal gland balancing the material and spiritual dimensions. The installation transforms Descartes' “harbor of the soul” into a cyborg organ. Through the flickering video light waves on the iris, it questions whether humans in the digital age can, through the prism of technology, recapture the surreal scenes that emerge from dreams—that is, shifting control from the physical to the spiritual.
Title: Calling III
Artist: Toyoya
Medium: Wooden Frame with Brushed Metal Panel, 130 cm x 60 cm x 60 cm / 140 cm x 47 cm x 42 cm
Title: Space, Play Temple
Artist: Toyoya
Medium: Lenticular Print, 100 cm x 60 cm
Title: PLAY GROUND
Artist: Toyoya
Medium: Russian Maple, 74 cm x 19 cm
Toyoya (Li Fan)'s pixel art blends graphic design syntax with the language of pixels, redefining the expressive dimensions of 8-bit aesthetics through the dialectical relationship between micro-units and macro-structures.
In the realm of dynamic art, he innovates the GIF format through a methodology of deconstruction and reconstruction, integrating modern motion design into looping sequences to create visual installations characterized by “metapixel” features. This creative practice not only serves as a contemporary revival of digital visual archives but also constitutes a philosophical exploration of the very nature of the image.