MAGICIAN SPACE 魔金石空间

While humans use technology and tools to control nature and dispel loneliness, in doing so we may imprison ourselves within the very systems we build. In the industrial-scale breeding systems of betta fish, emotion and power intertwine. Yeung questions: are we the ones loving and breeding, or merely agents of the system doing so?

I don’t want Xiaofang to become something marked by a politicized aesthetic stance. I’d rather it be grounded in realism—working with people from different social classes and backgrounds, and finding practical solutions through the details. It’s not about holding on to some grand ideal of overthrowing anything, but about making gradual progress in the real world. That, to me, is the essence of Xiaofang.

The concepts of morphology and morphogenesis have always been central to my spirituality, ever since I was a child observing the patterns in nature. Going out into nature and observing all the patterns, I gained a sense that what we perceive as a chaotic world actually possesses a deep, aesthetic order. It’s always patterning itself in really beautiful ways. All we have to do is just leave it alone and to let it do its own thing. If any little piece of the natural world is patterning itself in such a beautiful way, and the largest structures in the universe are also patterning themselves, everything in between is probably also deeply patterned including our individual lives. They’re sort of flowering in a way that there’s an order to it, that it progresses and it has its own embryogenesis in a way. I’ve always thought that’s a very reassuring idea and maybe it’s a way of conceptualising the idea of faith in a contemporary sense. And it doesn’t necessarily even have to be religious. It can be a secular proposition.

In the 2023 painting, Wu Chen accomplished his task brilliantly: while arousing and depicting the power of the spirit, he also endowed it with a broken order, rendering the picture logically solid and credible. As mentioned above, he tried his best to limit the process of creative transformation within the framework of self-growth, summoning his current self to start a battle with his past self. He slyly avoids the homogeneous issue that paintings on canvas in today’s China address: how to deal with the grafting of various cultural heritage contexts. Occasionally, he would take one or two threads from these connections, tell a story, and vigilantly maintain his independence and initiative.

“I like the uncertain, seemingly fragile part of the work, which is a critical “