Reflexion Archive: A Trilogy of Disordered Becoming

Text / Yuana

In Miscellaneous Mysterious Tales of Youyang from the Tang dynasty, a tale in the section Strange Objects recounts an enigmatic iron mirror: “Five inches in diameter, with a nose as large as a fist… several people gaze into it simultaneously, each sees only their own reflection, but not others’.” Imagine if all mirrors in the world reflected in this way—would the “self” we know be nothing more than an illusory figure that exists solely in the mirror? If every reflection is fundamentally non-overlapping with another, is the “self” then a closed cognitive island—neither visible to others nor capable of self-verification?

In an era of deep alienation, contemporary social structures increasingly sever individuals from shared experiences, pushing them toward fragmented, disjointed edges. People and objects are categorized, segmented, coded—drifting like isolated islands in a sea of fog. Much like the solitary reflection in the mirror, the “self” may have no tangible existence, yet it continues to shape our perception of the world and fortify the barriers between self and other. The works presented in this group exhibition do not aim to offer direct representations of reality; rather, they return to the interstitial cracks beneath appearances, revealing and reconstructing unspeakable psychic wounds and subtle dislocations within existing orders.

Delirium · Noncentral Landscapes

At the dawn of time, the world was not yet named. As described in Huainanzi, “obscure and dim, chaotic and unformed” is the primordial state of human perception—a shadowy, unrationalized visual realm, nebulous and formless. Here, landscapes are not products of human vision and do not submit to the sovereignty of the gaze. Instead, they are the covert habitats of heterogeneous beings. Images are not media of representation, but mystical visions encountered in states of delirium, recording the undivided terrain of all things before categorization.

Zhao Meng’s Inkscapes Ink series enacts the Daoist concept that “the greatest forms have no shape,” using ink to construct a vision of entangled illusions. Mountain contours dissolve like shadows; mist diffuses into boundaries, as if disclosing the Dao of the cosmos itself. Geographic space quietly melts into a flux seen through a “non-human eye”—a dimension that lies between primal matter and spirit. It is the residue of primordial energy and a projection of the artist’s unconscious imagery. The mountain is no longer a mountain; water is no longer water. Within these seemingly uninhabitable terrains, mirror images and phantoms entangle, and the boundary between self and object dissolves.

Zeng Jianyong’s Folk Landscape series further dismantles human-centric modes of seeing, as if leading us into an untraceable, unclassifiable expanse. Mountains and marshes remain tranquil as always, yet within their silence, strange narrative pulses stir. This is no longer a landscape in the traditional sense, nor a “place” located within any geographical or civilizational map. It is silent, lush, and gentle, yet harbors countless hidden, undomesticated forms of life. Viewers experience a rupture in habitual visual paradigms—habits of conquest, classification, and definition are suspended in favor of a silent, de-subjectivized gaze. Within this structure, imagery of unknown worlds begins to surface; flora and vegetation speak; scenic beauty becomes not a backdrop for humans, but a vessel for cohabiting otherness.

Aberration · Hysteria and Metamorphosis

Following the state of delirium, boundaries loosen. On the edges of rational civilization, aberrant forms begin to surface. They rise from the depths of nightmares, take shape in the shadow zones of the body, surging like a mysterious current beneath the skin. Painting ceases to be a craft of imitation and becomes a technique of manifesting the strange, extracting individual forms from fissures in collective consciousness. Bai Juyi already understood the essence of such change in The Six Records of Bai: “Although transformations are manifold, they are never-ending; things thus deviate from the norm.” Between the inconstancy of yin and yang and boundless mutations, biology, emotion, and identity cross into a domain of monstrous becoming. “Human” is no longer a stable category; it may become beast, ghost, or deity—an evolution of self and an echo of culture. In the images created by the artists, the human is no longer a self-contained, self-evident being, but an unruly flesh, a spectral presence beneath the mask.

Fang Lijun’s work constructs a visualized theater of estrangement. His recurring visages form eerie echoes across the canvas—at once masks of bodily distortion and visual residues of the collective unconscious. One notices the disappearance of his trademark grinning face in early works such as 1999.3.1, replaced by upward-gazing crowds. Expressions are frozen between numbness and stupor, arms raised in what appears to be a grotesque ritual; each hollow gaze measures the abyss between self and reality. Hysteria here is no longer a hidden symptom but a norm. Each face, through the act of being seen, undergoes linguistic erasure and corporeal dissolution, ultimately transforming into a contemporary totem of “monstrous flesh.” As facial certainty dissolves on the canvas, Fang does not merely establish a personal visual language but stages a psychogram of collective hysteria.

Ji Dachun’s works resemble an “anatomical log of aberrations,” each page recording uncertain beings—quasi-human, disquieting. His imagery hovers between mutation and collapse; figures deform across the canvas, as though birthed from the breakdown of psychic borders or as visible manifestations of inner demons. In The Tree of Bones, Ji constructs an ecosystem that violates natural laws: cells and bones parasitize one another; fungal threads pierce through skeletal gaps, composing a haunting scene of “organic proliferation.” It echoes French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of The Body without Organs: the unregulated potential of a body—not necessarily human—without organizational structures imposed on its constituent parts, operating freely. Ji’s twisted, unnamed lifeforms defy traditional taxonomy, struggling upward with vitality to break free from the confines of form.

Shattering · Order Collapses into Ash

What has been formed must await its demise.

Entangled with things, worn down by motion,

its course rushes toward exhaustion, and none may stop it—

is this not sorrow itself?

—Zhuangzi, On the Equality of Things

The beginning of life is a fated throw—existence never begins by choice. From the moment one takes shape, one is cast into the world, destined to erode through time. In this trajectory without origin or terminus, the self collides endlessly with the external until both form and spirit are dispersed. Or perhaps, as Laozi wrote, “Heaven and Earth are unkind; they treat all things as straw dogs”—nature is indifferent, and image, emotion, and flesh are all ultimately sacrificed. When “aberration” becomes a visible reality, the human urge is to break through barriers of perception and cognition—an act that entails the collapse of established frameworks. Attention no longer centers on a fixed gaze or unified structure. Instead, image is dismantled into layered fragments. Some artists thus take on the role of visual archaeologists, extracting remnants of memory from the ruins of collapsed order. The world persists not in vitality but in surplus, continuing in residual form. Vision cools; images turn to ash; a dim return to origin begins.

In this archaic excavation, Tan Jun offers a distinct path. His works often enter through the topographies of antiquity, constructing a visual lexicon that is at once familiar and estranged. With a cold, restrained hand, he renders semi-real, semi-imagined terrains and ambiguous zones—poetic rewritings of collapsed civilizational structures. His ink-on-paper work Terrified Beings 41, juxtaposed with the photograph Phenology 4, presents the figure of the deer as a connective image between antiquity and modernity. There is no narrative coherence here—only desolate perception and displaced realities left behind after human scale has been stripped away. The imagery congeals with the sediment of time, becoming striations of memory.

Sang Huoyao’s work further condenses the emotional and visual temperature. Through minimalist cool tones and enclosed compositional logic, he produces images devoid of focus or subject—aesthetic residues of failed measurement. Yet he titles these works with romanticized verbs such as When I Met You or Dreaming of Spring. The cold modular forms, stripped of warmth, enter into paradox with the literary connotations of their titles: the act of naming seeks narrative romance, while the images stubbornly maintain a Schrödinger-like ambiguity. Each of Sang’s works is a “fossil image,” a cross-section of time, a gaze into the image-world we inhabit—and a suspension of human subjectivity itself.

“Delirium—Aberration—Shattering” is not a linear progression but an endless drift and recurrence. “Shattering” is not a terminus but a threshold toward the next mirage. The individual flows within image and perception, adrift in tides of collapsing and reemerging orders—solitary, yet ever-folding through time. The artists’ practices become acts of persistent transgression, crossing between reason and delirium, awakening a world that, though not yet formed, is already present.