When “being seen” and “being understood” cease to coincide, how should painting respond? In a single shared space, we propose a dual experiment on the mechanism of viewing: Nianxin Li turns inward — paring down objects, decelerating time; Shiqing Deng turns outward — layering symbols, accelerating the senses. The significance of their juxtaposition lies not in stylistic contrast, but in a mutual verification of methodology — how painting might shift from the production of images to the production of perception, and how viewing itself might be rewritten in the contemporary environment of transparency and platformed structures.

 

Nianxin Li makes the unconscious the entry point of the picture. As she puts it, “Many people say that I and my work are very alike.” Her paintings are echoes of body and psyche: extended, convoluted forms that feel less like conscious control than instinctual emergence; bodily contours and “soft/rigid” structures lie latent beneath the brushstrokes — not deliberate, yet inescapable. She trusts the unconscious more than reason, and so she intentionally weakens naming and description, allowing images to shift from objecthood to energies and relations. 

 

Compared with 20th-century abstraction, she is neither the “de-narrativization” of minimalism, nor does she fall into the “subjective lyricism” of expressive abstraction. She translates fragments of unconscious imagery into relational composition, avoiding the bluntness of psychological symbol and approaching the “relational abstraction.” Visually, she sets up a syntactic grammar of forms using the binary opposition of “soft/rigid,” creating a continuous yet fractured surface system. Motifs like snails or shells are repeatedly deconstructed and detached. Her painting thereby departs from representational relations among objects, allowing form, space, rhythm, and breath to become the true subjects of narration.

 

In this exhibition, Unfurnished Moment is like a self-analysis, refracting her thought and method. It hints at luminosity yet purposefully remains blurred, creating an atmosphere where clarity and distortion coexist. The work points to the “over-visibility of privacy” in contemporary life: we inhabit nearly unprotected transparent spaces — seen but not understood. Here, “transparency” is like glass or plastic: it allows light and gaze to penetrate, yet blocks smell, touch, and breath; intimate relationships are exposed visually but cannot really be exchanged. In such a context, transparency no longer equals clarity but evolves into estrangement. Light skims across the shell-like surfaces she constructs yet struggles to penetrate inward; these vessels seem emptied of life, leaving only the relational shell. Even when intimacy emerges, it is converted into calm, abstract metrics — more akin to data architectures than to the flux of desire. 

 

Her practice likewise evolves with life: shifting from exploring external emotion to mapping self and unconscious interiority. She begins to ask: “Why do I not paint certain things?” This reflection born of refusal gives her works a calm yet profound layering —Each act of not painting becomes a more profound gaze. 

 

The practice of Shiqing Deng begins from external structure. She places food, art history, and digital culture side by side on the same dining table, using humor and absurdity as method — not as light rhetoric, but as critical installation. She first composes highly legible imagery, then disrupts singular interpretations through dislocation, anthropomorphism, and cross-sensory translation, turning consumable images back into perceivable structures. 

 

Her narratives are full of play: the dining table is dismantled into interfaces; food is translated into code and sound; QR codes invoke the auditory sense, so that painting becomes a multisensory distribution mechanism. In The Taste of Art, the symbols of art history are staged as a sensory feast — a self-mocking play on the power and circulation of images: lobster becomes Robert Indiana’s “LOVE,” Picasso’s cake, Rothko’s soup, and Mondrian’s table all co-perform — art history is transformed into a metaphor for a visual banquet. This form of “relaxation” in her recent practice is not randomness, but a natural control of the tension between order and chaos. She rejects repetition and external drive and maintains sensitive to changes.

 

This dual solo exhibition is not a contrast but mutual verification. Nianxin Li builds an inward time through subtraction, blankness, and incompletion,allowing seeing to grow sensitive through slowness; Shiqing Deng builds an outward time through hyper-legibility and multisensory collage, making seeing become self-aware in acceleration. The former draws intimacy back from over-visible transparency toward touch while the latter reveals how platforms format desire and attention into data. The two paths provide depth and breadth respectively: one clears the gaze; the other calibrates it. Together, they free painting from the obligation of representation, redirecting it to the production of perception, and returning to the viewer the body, time, and judgment of seeing. For today’s image environment, perhaps this is the starting point for re-establishing intimacy and understanding.