Exhibition review – Visual Art Journal – Art Magazine

Ke Qin: When We Were Birds

Zybc — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 03:34:24 +0000

From 5 to 9 January 2026, visual artist Ke Qin’s latest moving image series The Unbalanced Everyday, debuted at 67 York Street Gallery, London, as the centrepiece of her solo exhibition — When We Were Birds.

Installation view of When We Were Birds, 67 York Street Gallery, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.

When We Were Birds uses the bird as a metaphor to explore the psychological changes and identity displacement experienced by individuals in rapidly changing societies and environments. Her main artwork series, The Unbalanced Everyday, reveals the underlying precariousness within the lived experiences of climate migrants. By bringing these marginalised groups back into the public eye, Ke Qin compels viewers to reflect on the obscured reality behind the conventional narrative.

Installation view of When We Were Birds, 67 York Street Gallery, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.

Ke Qin’s practice explores the intricate interplay between perception, consciousness, and reality, employing fragmented and non-linear narrative structures through digital media. Her works delve into the profound internal shifts of individuals across diverse social backgrounds, heightening these shifts through spatial displacement, time delay, and perceptual imbalance to reflect the hidden tensions and alienation inherent in today’s society.

Installation view of When We Were Birds, 67 York Street Gallery, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.

In The Unbalanced Everyday, Qin envisions a post-dwelling age defined by a complete loss of control. These four moving images chronicle the evolution of the living environment from latent vulnerability to acute instability, and ultimately to gradual decline. As the narrative progresses, the audience experiences the continuous erosion of daily order, as well as the accumulated unease and imbalance of the protagonist — or us — amidst environmental changes. As their external structures continue to be reshaped and their sense of belonging gets lost, the character’s spiritual world continues to transition, and life becomes a reflection and magnifying glass of the psychological state.

Installation view of When We Were Birds, 67 York Street Gallery, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.

The exhibition depicts a state of displacement accelerated by changes in climate, policy, and social structures. Through these four moving images, viewers witness the protagonist survive and find their footing — a journey that is deeply human, primal, and personal, but also collective in its resonance.

At the Gentle Edge: Qingyuan Liang’s Inner Cosmos

Zybc — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 02:10:26 +0000

Illustrator and visual storyteller Qingyuan Liang presented her solo exhibition Intimate Cosmos: Mapping the Tender Space in London from 17 to 23 November 2025. This exhibition constituted a transient inner space: upon entering, visitors are not required to ‘understand’ anything but gradually realize they are being invited into an intensely private, quiet but authentic emotional world.

The Installation view of ‘Intimate Cosmos: Mapping the Tender Space’ in London

Liang’s practice centers on those ineffable sensations and how they leave traces within the body. Through hand-drawn works, fabric collages, paintings, and spatial installations, she constructs an honest retrospective. Her pieces often convey, at a profound level, an acknowledgement of vulnerability, an understanding of attachment, and a patient contemplation of uncertainty.

Installation view of ‘Intimate Cosmos: Mapping the Tender Space’ in London

The exhibition’s most significant piece is the fabric narrative work A Lion Wants a Hug. A small lion journeys through the process of seeking a hug. This simple-seeming story conceals profound psychological motivation. It speaks of ‘seeking love’ and how a person learns to believe: their emotions are worthy of being held. Fabric becomes pivotal to this work, soft, prone to wear, always wrapped around form. In this piece, the fabric transcends materiality, functioning more as an emotional skin.

Installation view of ‘Intimate Cosmos: Mapping the Tender Space’ in London

The work develops as a space installation, inviting viewers to step into the story instead of only standing outside observing it. In this process, the viewer gradually realizes that the embrace we seek does not always come from others; sometimes it resides within our relationship with ourselves. This is not a tale of growth or triumph, but an unfulfilled psychological journey.

The two paintings in this exhibition, Forest Zoo and Bringing the Olive Branch, reveal another facet of Liang Qingyuan’s visual language. Forest Zoo articulates an almost defensive imagination: nature, animals, and stars assemble into an idealized space, akin to a self-constructed sanctuary. Bringing the Olive Branch, inspired by her reading of Once Upon a Country: My Palestinian Life, avoids political imagery, instead interpreting ‘peace’ as a private state of being.

Installation view of ‘Intimate Cosmos: Mapping the Tender Space’ in London

This exhibition does not construct a dreamlike realm but reminds us that our inner worlds are inherently fragile and unstable but deserving of earnest attention. Through her art practices, Qingyuan Liang provides a means to reconnect with those unresolved yet enduring fragments within us.

The exhibition is presented by the London Art Collective.

Noctilucent: On Fissures, Echoes and Imperfect Subjectivity

Zybc — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 01:10:38 +0000

The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

Noctilucent unfolds within the faint glow of London’s Espacio Gallery from 30th October to 4th November 2025, drawing viewers into the boundary layer between consciousness and dreams with a light that is both near-constant and fleeting. The works are not arranged around a singular theme but gather silently in the darkness like noctilucent clouds, constructing a shared perceptual language through fragments, mist, echoes, and soft textures. Upon entering the exhibition space, it ceases to be a mere display and instead unfolds as a slowly revealing spiritual landscape: time dilutes, bodies fold, memories begin to shift, and identities re-examine themselves within the fissures of light and shadow.

Whispers of Time, 2024, Zhengwei Fan. The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

Xiao Ge’s Echo Bridge utterly liberates time and space from mutual dependence. Within the digital imagery, the bridge ceases to be a physical structure and instead becomes a psychological threshold: a path endlessly repeated and rewritten, yet perpetually unreachable. The fog, sound waves, and suspended bridge fragments create a drifting spiritual atmosphere throughout the exhibition. Meanwhile, Zhengwei Fan’s drawing Whispers of Time treats time as if lightly smudged by fingers, with figures and landscapes slowly settling into the depths of memory. Xiao Ge’s digital fractures and Zhengwei Fan’s painterly softening create a remarkable intertextuality within the exhibition, one delays time, the other dilutes it, yet both explore how we are shaped by time and how we rediscover ourselves within its fissures.

The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

Meanwhile, Ke Qin’s Swaying Within, rooted in psychological rhythm, translates swaying, restlessness, silence, and glare into visual language, abstracting the experience of spiritual dissonance into tremors at the level of imagery. This internal oscillation, coupled with the external flickering of light, enables viewers to not merely “see” but “feel” an internal collapse and reorganisation unfolding within the exhibition. At the exhibition’s opposite end, M L Zero’s Tiles As Flowing Memories Shore extends the discourse on time and identity through the ‘materialisation of memory.’ She visually resists linear temporality, rendering memory as a tidal ebb and flow—this formal fluidity, alongside Echo Bridge’s reverberant drift and Whispers of Time’s silent duration, collectively forms the exhibition’s temporal foundation.

Chillin in the bathtub, 2025, Cathalina Navarro Lagos. The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

Honey Baker’s works Between Petals and Thorns, Mary Jane, and Camomile imbue emotion with a soft yet unsettling tactility. This nuanced sensibility, alongside Cathalina Navarro Lagos’s collaged oil paintings, M L Zero’s memory fragments, and Zhengwei Fan’s temporal haze, collectively form the exhibition’s multi-layered exploration of the ‘inner world’.

The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

As a whole, Noctilucent presents a ‘landscape of proximity’ in both form and concept, where all works illuminate one another within a noctilucent glow. The contributions from Cathalina Navarro Lagos, Xiao Ge, Ke Qin, M L Zero, Honey Baker, Zhengwei Fan, and K M Bosy collectively form not a narrative universe, but a ‘ field of consciousness in the making ’. Here, the subject is no longer required to be complete, memory no longer demanded to be clear, identity no longer expected to be stable. True light is never bright; it flickers just as it is about to vanish. And we, too, often encounter that unfinished self anew within such faint glow.

Brighter than White, Darker than Blue

Zybc — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 02:34:25 +0000

Critical Review by Anna Gvozdeva

Staged at Fitzrovia Gallery in London and co-curated by Hongqian Zhang and Huan Zhou (ArtFlow Studio), Brighter than White, Darker than Blue succeeds in creating an immersive cosmology of cobalt blue. The exhibition is not simply a display of ceramic mastery; it is an orchestrated rhythm where objects, space, and atmosphere are choreographed to speak in unison.

Curatorial Rhythm

The show unfolds in three movements — Sequence, Flowers, and Hidden Rhythms / Enigmatic Shadows — each occupying a distinct emotional register. The progression from structured geometries to floral gestures, and finally into the psychological interiority of masks and organic forms, mirrors a musical crescendo followed by a pause. The curators’ decision to situate porcelain works in translucent, white-dominated displays against desaturated blue walls enhances the sense that these objects float, suspended between tradition and contemporaneity.

Atmosphere and Spatial Poetics

The gallery becomes a space of silence and resonance. Small framed works punctuate the walls like fragments of memory, while the central pedestals showcase porcelain plates, vessels, and masks as though they were constellations in a cobalt universe. The window installation — with oversized floral motifs and layered porcelain objects — creates an immediate dialogue with the street outside, extending the exhibition into the urban landscape. What could easily have become a didactic homage to Jingdezhen instead feels dynamic, alive, and deeply contemplative.

A Global Reframing of Porcelain

The exhibition’s achievement lies in how it reframes blue-and-white porcelain from decorative tradition to conceptual art form. By presenting Cheng’s works as vessels of rhythm, memory, and identity, ArtFlow Studio situates ceramics within the discourse of contemporary art rather than craft alone. It is a show that makes silence visible, fragility powerful, and porcelain — often considered static — vibrantly alive.

Whispers in Aria

Zybc — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 02:51:15 +0000

Whispers in Aria: A Review of Poetic Resistance at the Margins
by Anna Gvozdeva

Curated by HanYue, Whispers in Aria is a delicate, resonant group exhibition that brings together emerging voices in contemporary Chinese art, set against the conceptual backdrop of the 2026 Venice Biennale theme “In Minor Keys.” Held from August 1–3, 2025, at 17 Rue Chapon, 75003 Paris, France, the exhibition is presented as a curatorial response rather than a mere collection. It stages a quiet rebellion—a theatre of muted gestures and unresolved emotions, where the whisper carries the weight of resistance.

The participating artists are Yifan Li, Xiaoze Zhang, Mu Tan, Lin Ye, Jialin Wu, Cheng Xie, Xiang Li, Aini (Ellie) Zhang, and Qinglai Chunqi.

Yifan Li’s immersive installations explore memory and spatial narratives by reusing architectural materials to evoke lingering emotions within contemporary and historical contexts.
Xiaoze Zhang’s mixed-media work blurs boundaries between painting, animation, and sculpture, creating fragmented dreamscapes that explore perception and unresolved emotional states.
Mu Tan’s practice centers on psychological and emotional experiences of youth, using digital art to foster healing and reflection across generations.
Lin Ye investigates museography and transmedia storytelling, creating immersive environments that probe death, memory, and identity through sensory and conceptual layers.
Jialin Wu constructs speculative digital installations that challenge institutional narratives and explore ecological and ontological transformation.
Cheng Xie’s video and mixed-media work meditate on emotional exhaustion and the limits of empathy within contemporary digital and cultural structures.
Xiang Li composes multisensory works from natural materials, invoking a deep reconnection between body, earth, and instinct through tactile, scent, and visual elements.
Aini (Ellie) Zhang’s paintings dwell in existential introspection, translating fleeting emotional moments into intimate, tension-filled visual narratives.
Qinglai Chunqi contributes a poetic voice of subtle resistance, weaving soft yet resolute gestures into the collective dialogue of the exhibition.

Aini Zhang | Blue Hesitation

At the heart of the show are works by London-based artists Xiaoze Zhang and Aini Zhang, whose contrasting yet complementary practices invite viewers into spaces where silence resonates louder than words.

Together, these works embody the exhibition’s curatorial ethos: to reclaim the minor, the quiet, the peripheral. HanYue’s thoughtful staging avoids spectacle, favoring nuance and emotional texture. Her background in cross-cultural curating is evident in the exhibition’s fluency across geographies and sensibilities, while the spatial arrangement invites reflection rather than consumption.

Xiaoze Zhang | Desiccant vs. Rian

Whispers in Aria does not shout—it listens. It creates a space where absence is presence, and where fragility is rendered not as weakness but as depth. In doing so, it not only echoes the Biennale’s theme but extends it—offering a resonant platform for those who speak in subtler tones.

Curator: HanYue

Artists: Yifan Li, Xiaoze Zhang, Mu Tan, Lin Ye, Jialin Wu, Cheng Xie, Xiang Li, Aini (Ellie) Zhang, Qinglai Chunqi