I. The Critical Maladies of Our Time
II. The Asynchronous Conception of Work, Context, and Space
III. Addressing Questions: through Documentary Indexing
1. Beings Out of Place: Mud on the hubcap
Recently, a range of seemingly urgent issues have continuously hovered around us—perhaps starting with the last public health crisis, and leading inevitably to the rise of de-globalisation. These problems linger in our minds as if we can see them anytime, anywhere. They are clearly characterised—chaotic, complicated and contradictive, they always stuck among phenomena and ideas, like a bone stuck in the throat. And yet, we cannot detach ourselves from these disordered and collapsing nodes, for they precisely signify the vitality of the system and the latent meaning therein.
It reminds me of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), in which he explores racial differences and their diffusion effects. He recalibrates geopolitical closure and linkage, as well as the conditions for creativity to emerge or vanish. Nearly thirty years on, whether art can be seen as a form of productive labour—and whether it can bring us evolutionary concepts, or alternative pathways to solve problems—has become both a (un)reasonable expectation in an anxious society.
As such, whether through deduction or deconstruction, curating as an action here takes on the role of ‘testing’: in a cycle where standards of correctness and success collapse one after another, proactively disrupting beings that are habitual—stable, serene, orderly, seemingly safe will dissolve the bubble of self-deception and guide us toward spectral, undefined new directions.
2. Binding Fragments: From Space to Chambers, From Plants to All Things
Though ‘truth’ has been a lifelong pursuit for some, once it is reached—and before a new narrative begins—an endless void can take over the fate of civilisation. Translating the concept of ‘失律物’ into another language, Beings Out of Place reveals misalignments in ecology, moments of experiential failure within collective delusions, inertial resistance, and the emotional states of others—a semi-fictional corridor attempting to resonate with all living things.
When imagining this corridor at the beginning, I envisioned it as a dark space—enclosed yet open. A nearly black, short-pile carpet sets the tone of a low-noise environment, followed by the installation of a set of office furniture made of distinctive post-industrial composite board at the centre, becoming an island for video piece. Thoughts on ‘Out of Place’ slowly show themselves.
From dialogues with artists to the final form of the exhibition, the process of intertwining and adhesion happened almost ‘naturally’—a word I use cautiously, despite my critical stance, but have yet to replace with a more precise alternative. This coherence arises both from the seven artists’ shared reflections on modernity and the diverse, layered contexts of their growth and practice.
At the centre of the island is a post-Anthropocene office place, presenting Mingjing’s photography and video piece. Her works, often involving participatory actions or material interventions, express the fluidity and fragility of emotion and memory while probing the dynamic between body and society.
Another Orchids series at the gallery’s entrance and a clay pot platform placed by the window are the results of Qiheng’s field research on orchids in Singapore and Indonesia. His work—part scientific, part uncanny—includes illustrative diagrams and performative videos in public spaces. Through his reflections, cultural histories—like the cultivated Junzi Lan and speculative garden archaeology—interpenetrate into a subtle balance.
Also relating to rooms, spaces, and pressurised narrative chambers are the works of Li Jun and Liu Jin, as well as Zhu Yizhou, who explores feminine narrative and embraces the chance occurrences within painting through intuition. In an online meeting before exhibition, Li Jun, based in Vienna, described how she builds elastic spatial sensations between parts and wholes, stability and turbulence, allure and danger. By extracting everyday objects (such as teeth) from their original contexts and placing them into unsuitable environments, emphasises their ambiguity, irony, and self-reflexivity in her works.
Beside orchids and sunlight, Liu Jin’s paintings brim with whimsical imagery derived from serendipitous encounters in daily life. In the trace of a passing moment or a turn, how do we interpret a beam of light, a symbol, a gesture through visual association? And how might these shape our understanding of time and life? The answer may lie in the subtle clues between ourselves and the (un)real world we inhabit.
Fang Xianchen explores the interplay between outward observation and inward introspection. His work destabilises certainty while revisiting the dialectical relationship between individual identity and ‘the era’ we are in. Zuo Yanfeng’s paintings in the final chamber, staring at each other in silence, as if the mysterious wilderness is sometimes grand and sometimes tiny. He presents a frozen archaeology of intuitive metaphysics, casting the very definition of ‘rules’ back into the universal.
3. The Nonlinearity of Things
Amid the rapidly changing ecological and social context of today, ‘Beings Out of Place’ seeks, through its structural design, to explore how things adapt, deceive, co-exist, or escape via mimicry and mutation within environmental rhythms—thus forming another image of life, time, and existence. By combining the perspectives of ‘organ heterogeneity’ and ‘nonlinear time,’ the ‘失/Out of’ in the title is not about loss, but about revealing time’s ‘de-framing’ within contemporary life. The presence of the individual flashes forth in a process of perpetual incompletion and continual becoming.
We must emphasise and sincerely appreciate—just as John D Evans’s The Botany of Disire incisively examines how life thrives in complex environments through mimicry and symbiosis, it reveals the survival logic of all things. The rhythm system, originally the basis for trusting both algorithms and existence, collapses quietly in a semi-fictional world, triggering a reevaluation of artistic practices. When the body is understood as the sediment of time, and we approach the physiological and social intertwining from an ‘archaeology of the body’, the importance of documentary indexing becomes apparent—drawing on Donna Haraway’s ‘sympoiesis’, Anna Tsing’s ‘multispecies weaving’, Georges Didi-Huberman’s profound thinking on bodily traces, and literary explorations of nonlinear time (e.g., Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector).
Through this ‘restless rhythm’, we investigate how the body is infiltrated by invisible environmental pulses, entering a murky and uneasy state of being. The curatorial logic preserves an interest in latent philosophical ideas such as Georges Bataille’s ‘non-knowledge’, Georges Didi-Huberman’s ‘traces/afterimages’, and the metaphoric depictions of self-fragmentation in poetry (e.g., Sylvia Plath, Alejandra Pizarnik). These references guide the audience to reflect on their position and meaning within a dislocated ecology.
Lastly, a possible extension for future discussion may lie in the collaborative translation of capitalism’s control over time under the ‘politics of sleep’. This series of statements bridges biophilosophy, ecological politics, and humanistic reflection, aiming to provoke broader audience contemplation of the complex relationships between life and environment, and to engage with those vulnerable yet powerful forms and wisdoms of life. The exhibition aspires not only to be a concretisation of theory but also a site for deep insight into the intricate relationships among organisms, bodies, and their surrounding worlds—ultimately touching and releasing more beings, rhythms, and selves.
Yuting (Roxy) TANG 