CURRENT

By/Zhao Tianrun

Current is a group exhibition curated on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Beijing 2025, bringing together seven artists: Cactus, Lan Zhaoxing, Liu Zifeng, Luan Xiaocheng, Meng Deyu, Shan Yuhan, and Zhang Renjie. Across their varied practices, each artist deposits subtle sensations, deferred memories, and hesi- tant modes of perception into the pictorial field—like fragments left behind by the receding tide, sus- pended for retrieval, contemplation, and misreading.

Luan Xiaocheng’s paintings resemble a deferred collision. In The Silence of Ones, the skeletal structure of a triceratops is staged as an attempt to rationalize natural heterogeneity—becoming an archival node for prehistoric instinct. His layered surfaces—scraped, stained, and overlaid—render painting as a vessel for residual signals from a temporal rift. A spacecraft briefly flashes across the sky, linking the pictorial unrest to the broader indifference of a cosmic scale. The Mountains of Madness series amplifies nature’s magnitude and alterity, framing its Eastern sensibility of "emptiness and stillness" through spatial gaps and perspectival drift. The painted expeditions renounce heroic conquest in favor of intro- spection and intuitive resonance, transmuting obsession into quiet witnessing.

In The injury of reading, Lan Zhaoxing evokes the soundless growth of an unseen branch. Through aus- tere line and restrained structure, her compositions suggest care for a past too distant to grasp. Each form floats delicately in negative space, suspended between clarity and disappearance, staging a minimal yet poignant encounter.

Meng Deyu’s The Relative Error is marked by undisturbed calm. Light is distributed across the canvas with surgical precision, suggesting the quiet weight of responsibility. This finely calibrated illumination reveals slow ruptures—subtle shifts within shadows that demand repeated, attentive viewing. Natural motifs—palms, laurels, coastlines—become contours under pressure, where gleam becomes skin, and folds turn into persistent dents. Time loses coherence; tension accumulates in restraint.

Zhang Renjie’s images reside in a transitional temporality—early morning, interiors dimmed, objects on the cusp of emerging. Ordinary items are displaced and ritualistically reconfigured, delaying recognition and slowing perception. The monumental Trotter feels like a fossilized afterimage of prolonged looking— seared, then frozen. The marks and scorches resist narrative resolution, instead producing delayed, dif- fused echoes. The repetition in his work never returns to the same place, but circles the unknown in loops of hesitation and retreat.

In Staged Embrace, Shan Yuhan stages an image that both advances and recedes. A man and a bear intertwine without touching—neither conflict nor comfort, but a suspended co-existence. The bear’s elongated skull operates as a symbolic residue of primal speechlessness. Pressure accumulates in the silence between gestures, condensing into a claustrophobic theatricality. Curtains float, disorient. The viewer is drawn into an ambiguous zone—unfixed, directionless.

Liu Zifeng’s Hole opens into a space of repeated freezing. The painting unfolds in a zone of unnamable in-betweenness. Pigments are layered to a point of optical black, signaling the exhaustion of light. Trans- parent marks meander and cancel each other, like suppressed thoughts resurfacing. The space implodes and reassembles—generating a contemplative, forward-moving temporality, a paradoxical stillness in motion.

In Below the Contact, Cactus gestures toward the desire for injury—directed toward oneself or others. She encases this impulse in a classical frame, establishing a visible site for affective ambiguity. Yet look- ing does not guarantee comprehension. Shards of glass embedded at the center mark a threshold: they pierce the aestheticization of pain. What can be shown is fragmentary; what remains unspoken continues to course through the body—raw, unresolved, and irreconcilable.