Moonlight Fragment

'Gold has a light to illuminate things, it is called a mirror.' Mirrors bring a unique referentiality to people, who tend to be reticent when they are alone, and when mirrors appear, their replicated mapped image becomes a grotesque window for people to talk and interact emotionally. The moon, on the other hand, carries the ideals and new selves that we strive for. The mirror often reflects the 'habits' of each person, but habit is often a long-term behavioural pattern of the individual that lacks mobility and creativity, brings stagnation and boredom, and reduces everything to a shambles of fragments to be held together. If you want to put the pieces together and condense the light of the full moon, you need to form a more innovative and stable pattern of behaviour, a 'habit'. Habits are different from habits in that they constantly incorporate new elements from the surrounding environment into themselves, and through deep internalisation, construct new objects of practice.

According to Cooley's concept of the 'mirror self', the self originates from symbolic interactions with others in the context of a group, in which people get to know themselves through the attitudes and reactions of others to their own behaviours, as if they were discovering themselves in a mirror. As art creators, they are destined to experience different gazes and voices through such interactions, and are often caught in a dead-end cycle of receiving evaluations and jumping out of them. If they indulge in the comfort zone of creation, and then find it difficult to deny the self that is recognised by the eyes of the society, and dare not go through the hardship of breaking the mirror, naturally, they will not see the new moon.

This exhibition is the breaking of the cocoon of the ten young artists: in the interaction with others, and the formation and development of their personality based on this, they continuously break themselves, 'denying' the stereotypes that have framed them, presenting new explorations in painting and language in their works, and developing multi-form, multi-angle artistic practices. Finally they pick up the pieces that fit them among the broken mirrors on the ground, and continue to reorganise themselves into a more resilient self. This kind of 'denial' is the process of breaking and reorganising: denying that one is weak, sociophobic, a procrastinator. They step out of their comfort zones and continue to perceive, search for, and create new languages and situations, giving birth to the opposite of themselves. Each moon they create is a new chapter belonging to themselves, as well as a microcosm of the group under the times; like the millions of changing phases of the moon, even if it is sometimes cloudy and sometimes foggy, it can still shed a clear light among the vast number of stars.

— Ziyan Xu / Curator