07/03/2026
Join us this Saturday, March 14th for the opening of our new exhibition „Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through“, at our Beijing location.
“We’re investigating the language of the present from the perspective of the utopic, which is an exploration of difference, and the only way we can find to this language takes us through each other.”
— T Fleishman
The exhibition Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through, titled after the novel by T Fleischmann, a reflective work about art, embodiment, and how perception unfolds across time, brings together Yuan Ming and Chen Dandizi, whose paintings, videos, and watercolours share an attention to fragile images, quiet gestures, and suspended states of perception. Across these works, images appear as fragments that invite the viewer to slow their gaze and experience time not as narrative or explanation but as something the body itself gradually moves through.
Alibi
At the centre of each composition sits a closed red box, lacquered but mostly silent. The object reads immediately as a jewellery case, but what it ought to contain is absent: the jewel is gone, not shown or perhaps never even existed. Yuan Ming elevates these empty containers into subjects in their own right, creating a tension between interior and exterior, between the promise of something precious and the void it conceals. In these sites of reflection, the artist removes the objects of desire to reveal a deeper exploration of value, identity, and aspiration, while the works highlight the tension between exclusivity and accessibility, desire and imitation, subtly commenting on class, consumption, and aestheticised identity. The title Alibi introduces a legal and identity-related dimension that acts like a proof of presence elsewhere and the trace of a meaningful absence. One interpretation is that the closed box becomes a symbol of a locked interiority, a subjectivity to which access is denied, a gesture that also operates as a critique of the orientalist gaze that objectifies Asian women, reducing them to appearances and attributes.
Yuan Ming
Alibi X, 2025
Oil on cotton canvas
25x25x5 cm