BODU YANG

For more than a decade, in her In the Museum series, Yang has painted thresholds – doorways giving onto doorways, an empty plinth, a light from no clear source. Here she turns to the museum’s hidden half: the crating zones and closed corridors where art waits, unseen. These back rooms, she writes, “are not the opposite of art” but “among the conditions that allow art to appear in public” – spaces that cannot promise permanence, only “slow deterioration and buy fragile things more time.

The presentation sets this against two further back rooms. There is the internet’s Backrooms, the liminal-space myth born on 4chan in 2019 – an enfilade after its collapse, where “the axis continues but no longer provides direction” and the exit has quietly gone. And the oldest: the rear chamber of the Kizil caves in ancient Kucha, where the Buddha’s parinirvana waits in the dark, reached only through “the body’s actual passage.” From these comes the title – the Buddhist “long night” of birth and death, and the literal night an artwork waits to be seen again.

The paintings are titled like times – 0:04, 3:57, 12:18 – though none marks a moment on a clock. Yang calls them a “numerical climate”: not an hour but a painting’s light, weight and mood.

In the room, real doorways and door-sized paintings stand side by side. “An architectural doorway admits the body,” Yang writes; “a painting brings the body to a halt while allowing the eye to continue inward.” At each threshold a choice appears – where to pass, and where only to look: which door opens onto another room, and which “appears closed yet continues to unfold in the imagination.”

Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO