The exhibition Unforeseen Encounters does more than survey Yang Maoyuan’s recent practice; it reveals his way of seeing and his philosophy of life. Its title comes from the Guliang Commentary, “The Eighth Year of Duke Yin”: “A meeting without prior arrangement is called an encounter.” Here, “encounter” describes not merely contact between people and things, but a means of relating to the world within uncertainty.

A similar openness appears in The Zhuangzi’s “roaming the infinite without depending on anything”—an unconditioned, open, and free state. Yang’s method follows a comparable path. He neither fixes a direction nor rushes to absorb the unknown into an existing order. While walking, reading, looking, painting, and driving, he remains receptive, letting time and space, experience and memory, connect spontaneously. For Yang, art is not a pursuit of answers; it is an ongoing encounter with unnamed experiences and unreached places. These contingent encounters become starting points for his work, tracing a route between lived experience and memory. Bringing together the Pot People and Balloon Man series with sculptures from the Face series, the exhibition condenses what Yang has gathered through years of travel and observation, showing how he turns regional material and cultural textures into his visual language. Around this unfolding process, three threads emerge: the unforeseen encounter between body and land; between archaeological remains and pictorial conventions; and between the color temperature of sunlight and the colors of painting. They chart the artist’s movement from experience to image, perception to form.

As Yang has said: “Art is not the most important thing. It may be more interesting to understand people through art. I do not think much about the logic of art history; I think about the logic of human beings—my own logic.” His logic may be this: through sustained looking and work, to keep open the possibility of encounter between human beings and the world. Painting becomes an unfolding experience, allowing us, as time passes, to rediscover our connections with the world.