Bodies, Memory, and Vision in a New Chinese Queer Sensibility

The exhibition brings together the practices of Shen Jinghao and Shi Yi to explore how bodies, desires, and memories can still find visibility in a world inclined toward erasure. Inspired by the poetics of Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, who describes the body as both ruin and miracle, the show reflects on the persistence of the image and its ability to transform what risks disappearing.
Shen Jinghao employs film and performance to bring marginalised figures from Chinese queer history back into view. Through drag, archival material, and digital intervention, the artist constructs narratives in which past and present overlap, restoring voice and embodiment to lives erased from the record. His works move between documentary and dream, offering a form of historical empathy that turns visibility into a political gesture. Shi Yi, working in a pictorial language shaped by Renaissance and Expressionist traditions, transforms everyday scenes into theatrical allegories. His figures - men, animals, lovers caught in ambiguous gestures - emerge in a fragile balance between the sacred and the profane, revealing the emotional tensions embedded in ordinary life. Colour, shifting between lushness and decay, intensifies this sense of instability. Together, the artists articulate a queer sensibility deeply rooted in the Chinese context: intimate, surreal, and quietly humorous. The exhibition becomes a meditation on persistence - of image, memory, and desire - and on the capacity of art to let flourish what history too often casts into shadow.