Xu Zhen: Painting as Ecosystem

A click, a long breath - between accelerated perception and slowing thought, Xu Zhen’s field of action opens up. The exhibition tests the idea of “ecosystem as medium,” where the term encompasses not only nature but also history, geopolitics, ideological apparatuses and technologies. At its center is Chinese painting, reactivated not as a revival but as a contemporary apparatus - a grammar capable of connecting modes of seeing with systems of value. Four chapters draw a clear progression. Giant channels ritual energy through gesture and ink, turning the vessel into a microcosm. Shan Shui rewrites landscape as an explorable data topology, a digital terrain to be traversed rather than merely contemplated. Mist brings time to the surface of matter - silk as a living trace -, while Enlightenment sets news imagery alongside the Zen tradition of satori, triggering short circuits between reportage and revelation. This is not a philological exercise: it is a reconfiguration of the Chinese pictorial system into an operative architecture for the present, able to speak to a global horizon. In an era marked by ecological crises, technological upheavals, and shifting geopolitical maps, Xu Zhen shows how that mesh of cosmology, spatiotemporal order, and artisanal procedures can become a tool for rethinking culture and imagination. Here, contemplation does not oppose speed - it passes through it, expands it, and makes it productive again.