Villa tbh

The Purple Sun Will Sleep in the Lake
Subtitle: Images, Materials, and a Thousand Breaths

Exhibition at the end of the residency:
24/05 - 08/06 2025
10h-18h Mon. -- Sun.
15 tao jiang road

The image is often seen as a copy of the visible world, the mirror of a consciousness. But in this exhibition, it is just as much a door as it is an illusion, an extension of language as much as it is a shadow of the body.

The artist explores three artistic languages — oil painting, knitting, and digital printing — to shift the image into the material. The image is thus woven into threads, inscribed onto canvases, or printed onto curtains, gaining rhythm in its breath, tactile texture, and a slow dynamic.

In The Purple Sun Will Sleep in the Lake, digital images printed on curtains subvert the classic sunset scene: here, the sun no longer descends vertically, but slides laterally to the right, slowly drifting into the lake — like three frames of a silent film, stretched across time. Reflections, a knitted painting, trees confronted with their distorted reflections in the water appear confused and hesitant. The Trees Know Everything juxtaposes a trunk and a human figure, frozen in the same verticality. This parallel between tree and man evokes the ancient spirits inhabiting the forests — invisible yet profoundly present, steeped in mystery. In Five Green Bulbs, a digital drawing, the artist intertwines the words of Jules Verne from The Green Ray — "He who sees the green ray sees clearly into his own heart and the hearts of others" — with a line from Zhang Chu’s song Ants, Ants — "On a gray day, I saw the sun, I saw myself." The image seeks its own language, somewhere between intimate revelation and uncertain flickering.
In Moths and Small moth, an oil painting, the image becomes a metaphor for language: three moths disrupt the vision, questioning the limits of meaning. The title itself plays with a word in Chinese — "幺蛾子" (yāo é zi), which is a slang term that literally means "small moth" but is often used metaphorically to refer to a "bad idea" or something troublesome. This wordplay introduces an element of linguistic disruption, as Wittgenstein wrote: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." When an unexpected word emerges — "bad idea" or "moth" — can we still see things neutrally?
These works are both clues to the real and metaphors. Although immobile, they seem to whisper, inviting silent listening.

Like dreams, they do not seek to communicate directly, but to be perceived. What you encounter here is not an answer, but a parallel language — a slow rhythm, suspended in time.

Works produced during artist's residency
Villa tbh, Shanghai, China.