Group Exhibition ShanghART M50, Shanghai
Artist: Hu Chenyu, Jin Jinjin, Liu Tong, Zheng Que
Curator: Ren Baiyu
Duration: 2026/1/31 – 3/31 (Tue. - Sat. 11am-6pm)
Location: ShanghART M50, Bldg. 16, 50 Moganshan Rd., Putuo District, Shanghai
Press Enquiries: press@shanghartgallery.com
www.shanghartgallery.com
What we see is a half.
Right now, the exhibition “Distance” in London is showing four works—about separation, deflection, obstruction, and dislocation—while the exhibition “Shared” in Shanghai is also showing four works—about synchronization, connection, communication and sharing. Distantly, faintly, yet truly, they are forming a spatiotemporal structure of “Shared in Distance”.
And you are the passage.
Here, your time will be calibrated to another place—seven hours later or seven hours ahead. You are not entirely in Shanghai, nor entirely in London, but somewhere in between, almost like a kind of suture. No—you are the suture itself. You are seeing one half, your gaze, your steps, your fingers will awaken the other half.
When there are footsteps, a mimosa in the distance closes in response. As a person and a hot air balloon separate apart, the northern and southern hemispheres are spinning in sync. It took eight minutes to find the Shengbang International Plaza, but only a pine-scented kiss to find the spring. Not understanding Japanese, I could only respond with a whistle—but then it snowed, and I brought you a snowfall.
It is this half, as you see it, that reveals the possibility of the other half—like a monkey-head mushroom on one tree, meaning another monkey-head mushroom is not far opposite. What matters is precisely this trust: knowing before seeing. Seeing a half is seeing the whole. Could our experience of separation and reunification be the same? In separation, what separates is in fact an inseparable connection; and in the process of reunification, we regain what we thought we had lost.
Tossing between the poles of duality, we sometimes feel the pain, sometimes feel blessed—but what if they are signifying each other? “There is an analogy between the low and the high,” Simone Weil once said. Perhaps experiencing one is experiencing the other? And thus experiencing the whole? This is a bold hypothesis: in a wholeness that remains invisible to us, we have never been damaged; what appears damaged has merely been displaced elsewhere—when we misunderstand, we are also understanding; when we think we have taken the wrong path, we hare also arriving—only we usually realize it much later, when space-time completes itself.
Is it possible to prepose this understanding—to live directly in that trust, like a monkey-head mushroom? If that seems unlikely in reality, then build it: send signals from London and Shanghai, in a way that experiences of the shared and the separate are connected in the air—faintly, remotely, but truly. At the exit, you can call the exhibition across on a phone, browse its Wechat moments, and see what it shows. It will supplement the other half from afar, creating a spherical dome that arches over all of us.
A sphere is also a kind of passage, or rather a collection of countless passages, between seeking and creating, between whistle and snow, between being here and ten thousand miles away, between the southern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere. A sphere is
the arrival created by one point’s complete trust in another point—not as a movement from one to the other, but as a repeated trust, in one’s own retreat, in what is still not yet comprehensible, until we reach the opposite of ourselves, and become the other point.
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