Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through: Yuan Ming & Chen Dandizi

The exhibition takes its title from T Fleischmann's book, expanding the gender transition allegory as a reflection on the body's relation to objects and gestures in the world. Across painting, video and works on paper, Yuan Ming and Chen Dandizi explore processes of transformation in which objects shift toward subjecthood and images emerge through repetition, folding and time. Both artists work with fragile materials and everyday forms: gift boxes, roses, candles, lemons, books and wallpaper. These elements appear not as static symbols but as sites of action. Paper is folded into flowers, boxes flatten into images, and simple gestures unfold into sequences. The exhibition is structured around acts of making and remaking in which meaning is never fixed but gradually produced through time. As stated by Yuan Ming: "This process of meaning-making does not end when the artworks are finished. It continues with the viewers being confused or deciding what it is, creating a subtle grey zone in which interpretation remains open."

A shared motif of folding runs through the exhibition. In Chen Dandizi's video Rose, The Rose, hands repeatedly fold two different types of origami roses whose images overlap and bleed into one another. The gesture repeats like a cinematic echo, gradually transforming a sheet of paper into the universally recognised symbol of a rose. Nearby, Meaning Erodes Sense unfolds as a sequence of minimal actions: a finger held near a flame, a lemon cut open, flowers submerged in water, pages torn from a book. Each act resembles a visual verse in a film-poem where objects become charged with symbolic intensity yet resist fixed interpretation. In Yuan Ming's paintings, flattened gift-box diagrams derived from DIY folding tutorials appear as luminous geometric forms suspended within atmospheric fields. Removed from their practical function, these folded structures oscillate between ornament, abstraction and architecture.

In the series Soft Halos of the Giants, Yuan Ming renders these folded box structures in egg tempera, a medium historically associated with Byzantine icon painting, those giants of the form whose influence continues to shape contemporary image-making. Stripped from their everyday origins, the unfolded gift boxes begin to resemble architectural ruins or the fragments of a forgotten civilisation. This movement between object and subject also appears in the paintings of the Alibi series, where small leather red boxes sit silently at the centre of each composition. The jewel they promise to contain is absent. The box remains closed becoming a symbol of withheld interiority and a critique of the orientalist gaze that objectifies Asian women by reducing them to their appearances, denying them access to a subjectivity of their own.

These forms reveal how images migrate and transform as they move between contexts: an origami rose that folds into a French literary symbol, a gift box flattened into a Byzantine painting. In the watercolours on Fabriano paper coated in UV resin, a small dark rose appears isolated at the centre of an oversized frame. The title Of course I love you. It is my fault that you have not known it all the while , it borrows a line from Saint-Exupéry's rose: a character who loves without saying so, who controls through silence and fragility. The distance between the frame and the concentrated image speaks to the subject's vulnerability. The rose is never entirely free. She dies, and reminds whoever looks that every life has an end.

Through these quiet actions, the exhibition proposes a slowed experience of looking. What remains at the centre of the works is the body itself : hands folding paper, objects shifting between decoration and abstraction, images emerging and dissolving through time. The exhibition invites viewers to inhabit the works as one inhabits a poem. Letting fragments, rhythms and silences produce their own resonances and accepting that identity, emotion and meaning are not fixed states but processes like forms continuously shaped by the simple fact that time is the thing a body moves through.

Lily-Rose Ricaud-Le Nagard