In the practice of Li Jiawen and Shen Mingquan, various and elaborate threads are revealed to the audience through a range of forms. Originating from personal experiences and visions, they experiment, explore and present work through graphic design, mixed media installation, film, and experimental video.

Li Jiawen’s real-life account of a fraud is told through the eyes of a young woman who sells flowers for a living. The figure in the work is driven away, wandered, and encounters the same experience in a different time and space in a state of limbo.

The artist forensically revisits, deconstructs, and reconstructs this experience, extracting visual elements and coded language, fusing time, place, and events to recreate an unstable space-time, filled with fragments of elements from different dimensions. The artist’s individualized perspective creates a thread that collides in a cascade of virtual and real events. The artist does not present a direct facsimile of the events but leaving gaps in these ‘scenes’ for the viewer’s imagination.

In the Shen’s two videos work, she presents the behavior of a ranger who develops into obsessive behavior as they repeatedly photograph trees repeatedly. Through this behavior we witness the process of the ranger and a human ape exploring each other. In these two stories, the authors attempt to make visible movements hidden in linear time and real space, capturing what remains of the daily fracture, revealing, small and always unbridgeable gaps in time. At that point where nothing is seen, where there is no meaning, the image returns to our gaze, where one encounters one’s own object-relative. Do clues and information become lost in this flow?

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