LI MUHUA, YANG XINGUANG

Yang Xinguang’s work commands a monumental scale. Yet rather than imposing upon the space, it seems to grow out from it, dwelling on the immediate relationship with its environment. Conceived and constructed in situ, the work engages in direct dialogue with its surroundings. As one navigates the towering structure, a doorway frames an unexpected glimpse into another realm: Muhua Li’s paintings, quietly nestled in a seemingly private space. Though as if arranged with deliberate care, these small-scale works betray a sense of temporariness towards the white wall, revealing a provisional relationship between the studio paintings and the site politely unresolved.

Two luminous presences, the electronic screen and the glaring light box, assume by their nature an adversarial stance toward the space. In electronic screens are often distant temporal or spatial realms, while light boxes enforce visual dominance through unrelenting radiance. In this exhibition, however, the screen displays Yang Xinguang’s work in the immediate exhibition space while the light box submits to asserting Muhua Li’s artwork it shares space with. Though stripped of their role in message communicating, ways of seeing integral to the media linger: the screen’s claim to documentary veracity and the light box’s tyranny of visibility. At stake remains the fundamental question: the unstable distance between subject and object.

Enveloped in an air of mystery, the massive, peculiar form features rebars twisted with unexpected grace alongside heavy wooden branches cradled like fallen leaves, conjuring an enigmatic force. Yang Xinguang repeats the same motions relentlessly: bending each straight rebar bit by bit, carving each branch’s bark away little by little. This repetition imposes a sense of unity while revealing nothing beyond pure physical labour—a unity of the unknown requires no intellectual understanding but immediate bodily perception. The rebar structure, undulating like air currents, simultaneously suspends the branches and embraces the bodies moving through it.

Objects in Muhua Li’s oeuvre often appear at once familiar items and uncanny doubles in different colours. While maintaining the eerie dimensional uniformity of mass reproduction, each envelope, pencil, and ruler throbs with a distinct disposition conjured through the artist’s restrained brushwork. Characters in Li’s work are not material objects—she does not portray real-world stationery items but embodiments of colours and shades. For Li, colour, instead of a feature of the object, is something abstract yet precise, where the boundary between the subject and object dissolves. In Li’s painting, it is not a blue ruler but the ruler blue; it is not the blue in the sky but the sky in the blue.