Artists: Louise Gaubert, Tommy Jayne, Zac Merle, Xinde Ren
Curated by Huiyu Lan
This is an experimental exhibition designed to explore the Paradoxical Field. It will unfold in three iterations, with this first chapter titled Paradoxical Field — Prelude (I).
While the notion of “paradox” has been discussed within philosophical and economic contexts, it has primarily been confined to formal logic and cognitive structures. As a result, the term is most often associated with the realm of logic. This project aims to liberate “paradox” from traditional frameworks of logic and rational analysis, shifting the focus toward the paradoxical mechanisms embedded in perceptual experience, abstract language, and the dynamics of viewing. From the viewer’s perspective, it aims to activate the kinds of perception that elude purely rational capture.
In the context of contemporary art, this type of paradox does not highlight the failure of formal logic, but instead reveals a generative tension and conflict: from abstract concepts and hazy states of consciousness to feelings that language cannot fully name; from symbolic theoretical systems to the construction of visual language. The process of creating an artwork inherently carries a contradiction between expression and the inexpressible, preserved through sensory dimensions like material, composition, rhythm, colour, and even scent.
Once this abstract visual language enters a concrete exhibition context and is perceived by the viewer, it undergoes various degrees of compression and progression. What this exhibition aims to highlight is precisely the “lost data” within this compression—a translation of emotion that occurs in real time but defies restoration.
In the gap between visual language and rational logic, emotion becomes the medium. Emotion does not adhere to logic, does not justify itself, nor wait for validation—yet it holds the most immediate power of transmission. It becomes the receiver of paradoxical perception and offers a way of generating meaning outside of knowledge systems. As Madsen states in Mood Over Content, emotion is not “about” something—it is the energy and aftershock of art itself.
Between the work and the viewer, the untranslatable becomes the very stage on which emotion emerges.