by Ryan Sun, bARThroom Experimental Gallery china
“Through the mist-washed Niwan, between stirring feet, a city appears—unraveled like silk.”
— Ryan Sun
The group exhibition Silk in the Mist opens with this eerie couplet, offering both poetic entry and philosophical basis by which to followhow body and perception co-construct an “invisible order” incontemporary art. This exhibition features artists from China, Japan, and New Zealand, establishing a cross-cultural dialogue that reveals generative tensions and relational forms that lie beyond the visible.
Rather than looking at materials as passive bearers, the works bring to the foreground material agency where clay, fiber, rubber, celluloid, and painting are not termini, but actors in an ongoing process of becoming. Throughout the exhibition, the body is not merely represented, but performed, interwoven with dynamic material ecologies that repetitively remake space, memory, and meaning.
坂井存 (Sakaizon)’s rubber installation responds to real-time air pressure changes, destabilizing static notions of form and instead emphasizing tension between body and space. Soppy Qi’s handmade film photographs encapsulate a melancholic materiality of emotion and memory. Her work constructs slow narratives that flicker between clarity and blur, inviting viewers to “squint” not merely visually, but perceptually at the spaces between self and city.
Ryan Sun’s installations take this language a step further towards a process philosophy, where clay, thread, and vegetable matter are in a state of ecological co-construction. They are not objects, but systems reflecting the fact that material is always already in transit air and body.
Cultural and metaphysical discussions ensue forcefully with therecontextualization of Jingdezhen ceramic practice by Lu Jianxing within the framework of contemporary sculpture. Tang Qiang’s oil painting classical language is translated into a bodily, earthly gesture, remeasuring geography in bodily terms.
Kirsten Dryburgh (New Zealand) employs an ancient-futurist visuallanguage that breaks with linear thinking about time, combiningtraditional craftsmanship with conceptual modes to think in place and timelessness.
The addition of Huang Hui Xian (China) brings an additional level of metaphysical complexity to the show. Her paintings are rooted in Eastern and Western mysticism, folk cosmology, and symbolic systems such as the Five Phases theory and astrological charts. They are poetic time devices propelling the observer into a realm of speculation where abstractions of natural symbols discuss rhythm, balance, and elemental transformation. Perception becomes meditation here.
Together, these pieces make up an invisible city an immaterial architecture of sensory understanding, material intelligence, and trans-cultural memory. Silk in the Mist resists straight reading; it gives instead a layered, nonlinear field of perception wherein body, time, and matter are involved with one another.
Location:
Barthroom Experimental Gallery
Building N1, Room 210, Taoji West Gate 1, Taoxichuan Creative Zone
Zhushan District, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, China
Opening Reception:
August 5, 2025 (Tuesday), 6:00 PM
Exhibition Duration:
August 5 – [Insert End Date], 2025
Participating Artists:
Sun Sun (China),
Sophy Qi (China),
Tang Qiang (China),
Lu Jianxing (China),
Kirsten Dryburgh (New Zealand),
Sakaizon (Japan),
Huang Hui Xian (China)
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About the Exhibition
Silk in the Mist is a cross-cultural group exhibition that inspects the manner in which perception, bodies, and materials co-produce aninvisible and dynamic order. Through the different mediums ceramic, fiber, rubber, celluloid film, and painting the exhibition uncovers the generative logic of matter and its intertwining with memory, cultural symbolism, and spatial transformation.
Denying the traditional idea of art as something static, the exhibition positions each work as a site of relations: between body and environment, between cultural memory and living material. The title isnot only naming a visual metaphor, but an embodied mode of perception to squint, to see incompletely, intuitively and inwardly.
Artists reconfigure ritual, craft, and ecological time. Sakaizon’s pneumatic rubber sculptures breathe space; Soppy Qi’s film narratives collapse memory into material; Ryan Sun’s installations grow from soil and thread into living systems. Kirsten Dryburgh folds together temporal aesthetics and ceramics; Lu Jianxing bridges the historical weight of porcelain with experimental forms. Tang Qiang traverses terrain with paint as pilgrimage. Huang Hui Xian maps cosmic and symbolic systems into layered visual fields, merging mysticism and abstraction.