Floating Structures
Changting Gallery
21 - 30 October 2022
https://www.changting-gallery.com/exhibitions/20221021
"The world is always slightly floating in an almost invisible way."
——Research on the Materiality
Contemporary visual culture has been premised on a stable horizon.
Galleries "fix" artworks, materials are given "positions" by gravity, and viewers grasp the world within this order. But what if we
strip away the premise of gravity? The structure of the exhibition, the existence of objects, and the act of "seeing" itself begin to take
on unexpected fluctuations.
"Floating Structures" inverts this myth of stability quietly.
All the works in this exhibition take "drifting" as the core of their thinking. Drifting is not merely a physical phenomenon, but an
epistemological trigger that shakes the structure of the world. Planes cutting through the sky, time spilling out of frames, walls
trembling as if the exhibition stands are breathing—these are visions of another world that emerge when objects are freed from order.
This exhibition brings together 6 artists from China and Japan, intersecting painting, light structures, video, and installation art.
Through "the exhibition space itself" as a medium, they simultaneously evoke multiple universes with different gravitational fields.
In "Yoyo's Museum", Ding Yudan deviates from the institutional space of the museum gently, presents "reorganized exhibition room"
where planes and famous paintings float softly.
Through "Air Specimen Room", Lu Qingyuan "specimens" air currents, depicts the mechanics of gaps existing within the exhibition
room.
With "Drifting Flight Diagram", Shirai Haruto replaces the flow of the exhibition venue with flight routes, reconstructs the act of
viewing as navigation.
In "Dissolving Display Wall", Miura Tōko liquefies the form of the exhibition wall, transforms the museum architecture into a
breathing organism.
Shenlu’s "Crysflake" is a light structure reminiscent of crystals formed near zero degrees, visualizes the invisible tension of air and
crystallizing the space itself.
In "Drifting Gallery", Andō Kaishōrearranges artworks within a video space, presents the "drifting" of an exhibition room liberated
from gravity.
What unites these works is their sensitivity to "that which is not fixed".
When the institutional gravity of the exhibition room eases, objects lose their inherent static attributes and form new structures within
a network of relationships. As the philosopher Merleau-Ponty stated, "Perception is not the occupation of the world, but the
continuous sedimentation within it." The works of this exhibition precisely capture the "glimpse" where that moment of
sedimentation inverts into the air.
"Floating Structures" is not merely a metaphor, but a curatorial thinking device.
Objects, images, light, memory, air—they exert gravitational pull on one another, carving through a drifting nebula. As viewers walk
slowly along its orbit, they will reconsider gravity, scale, and "what an exhibition is".
To borrow the words of Public Clay:
"Art is not the reproduction of what is visible, but an attempt to depict the traces of invisible forces."
"Floating Structures" gently brings to the fore the moments when those traces glow faintly and traverse the space.
Exhibition On-Site photos