Light Shadow
Participating Artists:
Light Shadow
Dates: 2025.9.20 -10.28
Centred on the motif of “light,” this exhibition unfolds a twofold inquiry into time, memory, and manifestation. On one hand, it traces the marks left by physical light as it passes through air, dust, and texture; on the other, it engages with the phenomenological notion of “givenness”—where the work itself arrives at viewing through its own manifestation, and settles within the psyche as the very grain of memory. As Jean-Luc Marion has stated: what makes art art lies not in representation, but in “becoming a work in the self-giving of its manifestation.”
In the practices of these two artists, “traces of light” are both generated through painterly language and central to the experience of viewing. Lin Wenjie employs acrylic and collage to capture the glimmers and atmospheres of everyday moments, transforming ordinary scenes into lyrical spaces. Liu Yang, through acrylic on wood, gazes into the dust and silence of history, allowing forgotten instants to re-emerge in the light. The paintings of these two artists meet here, forming a conversation charged with tension: through different paths, they collectively respond to the question of “how painting makes the invisible visible.” When light reaches the viewer, it lands not only on the surface of the canvas, but also within consciousness, leaving a trace that can be recalled and re-experienced. Thus, “Traces of Light” becomes an interwoven trajectory—between nature and culture, reality and memory, the personal and the historical.
