GROUP EXHIBITION

Back to Basics set the backdrop of global economic and political crises, where the boundaries of everyday life are being steadily worn away. This exhibition seeks to explore how individuals and communities protect, reconstruct, and reimagine the “daily life” amid uncertainty. Featuring multimedia works — spanning painting, installation, and sculpture — the exhibition presents the way when daily life becomes a site of resistance and repair through an transregional and cross-cultural lens.

Cyryl Polaczek’s paintings drift between reality and reverie: a cat leaps onto the windowsill, eyelashes rest between book pages, and socks sway gently in the wind......These dreamlike scenes poeticize the mundane and carry a quiet melancholy. At the intersection of the real and the imagined, subtle gestures unfold into small dramas of everyday life.

In Wei Libo’s installations, the traces of urban transformation and the intersections of Eastern and Western experiences are subtly inscribed. For the artist, memories of his upbringing inform an intuitive creative process: found pieces of wood bend and curve, suggesting both a roof beam and the gentle arc of a chat emoji. Carefully sanded blocks of wood lean on one another like punctuation and breaths in a love letter — tender, intimate, and sincere. The inlaid and assembled structures function simultaneously as fragments of personal memory and metaphors of collective experience: parts that might decay or vanish are securely placed within the new whole, forming a self as if pieced together like a puzzle. Imperfect yet authentic, these works affirm the individual’s place within the flow of time.

In contrast to her earlier exploration of dancer’s movement and gesture on stage, Zheng Zhilin’s new works capture moments of still introspection. A reclining figure holds an insect; fingers interlace under a downcast gaze; a face rests against a palm in quiet contemplation. Through the tension of light and shadow, Zheng renders emotions that are at once full and distant, revealing the duality of her subjects as both the observers and the observed.

Augustine Paredes works with Piña fiber, a delicate and translucent material derived from pineapple leaves, which considered to be a cultural symbols of Philippine since the colonial age. Beneath its gauzy surface, images becomes half-visible. Light and shadow flow through fingertips; clarity and obscurity interlace like memory — or identity itself. Second-hand frames draped in flesh-toned fabric hold tender, floating recollections; fragile lace flowers layered over Piña fiber evoke the fragile rhythm of breath, recalling the artist’s experiences of migration, queerness, and postcolonial identity.

Rika Minamitani’s paintings depict urban crowds through exaggerated proportions and deliberate blankness. Wide-eyed figures stretch their limbs across the canvas in gestures both absurd and harmonious. Her compositions, reminiscent of ukiyo-e rhythm, render the city as both cacophonous and self-content. Each frozen pose captures an ordinary moment in flux, where exuberance and loneliness coexist.

A sense of humor always lies within Kara Chin’s work, at the junction between the virtual and the real. The ceramic panels were derived from the ongoing series Mapping The Wasteland for 2025 Liverpool Biennial, where the recurring motifs such as seagulls and buddleia humorously reimagine daily life in Liverpool. These ceramic shards — resembling excavated relics — are mounted on modern furnitures in a minimal style, enveloping digital imagery within traditional totem pattern consisting of flora, birds, and flames. The restless pulse of the everyday runs through her prophetic style, as though she is uncovering the submerged undercurrents of technology and modernity.

Alicja Pakosz captures contradictions and tensions embedded in everyday details. Her paintings, as if viewed through a magnifying lens, fixate on ordinary yet intimate moments where each detail feels almost tangible. The bizarre hides within the familiar — hair tangled, flowers distorted in reflection, birds flew past the city. Anxiety and humor coexist; the absurdity of life unfolds in stillness. Pakosz invites the gaze to linger and the mind to wander, extending invisible corners of daily life into boundless imagination.

In Han Xinyu’s paintings, tangible experiences drawn from everyday life converge with the intangible sensibilities of literature. Her brushwork drifts between meticulous depiction and diffused layering, allowing emotions to ebb and flow across the surface. The peeling “wallpaper” extends from the canvas into space, becoming an embodiment of time—at once an image of decay and an ornate cage in collapse. Through her visual orchestration, Han reaches a delicate threshold between restraint and release: a pause that coexists with perpetual movement, where both stillness and duration echo the nonlinearity of time itself.