The Moment of Falling

Open: 10-12 May 2019
12-6p.m.

Private view: 10 May 2019 6-9p.m.

Artists | Xia Mengfan, Zheng Kaijia

Curator | Chen Junyao

“An alertness falls asleep. On the edge of sleep, we can feel that we are beginning to stop feeling the basic energy of our bodies. We feel the suspense of feeling. We feel ourselves falling, we feel the fall.”

In The Fall of Sleep, Jean-Luc Nancy mentioned a special “moment of falling”. It is a tipping point, something that appears frequently in our struggles between sleeping and waking, illusion and reality. The artists Xia Mengfan and Zheng Kaijia transferred such struggles into a reference to their hesitation and action in their process of creating. It then became a prevention mechanism, which serves as self-restraint and guidance. To the artists, such a mechanism is not a hinder of creativity, but rather self-discipline that constructed out of their own day-dreaming, childhood experience, and personal aesthetic. It is the gradience of their creative ideas. In the meanwhile, they accept that the mechanism should not stay unchanged: things in everyday life keep challenging it in an intangible way, putting the active minds into sleep. Every time “the moment of falling” hits, potentially dangerous or amusing moments flash in their creating minds, and present themselves randomly or intentionally on the canvas. These abstractions of order and characters of emptiness will forever remain the way when they were created. They jump out of the range of time, observe the artists’ flow of thoughts, reaffirm their own existence. The prevention mechanism will be working, expanding its choices, and guiding the artists in their understanding of the real world. Again, the mechanism controls “the moment of falling”. It is not the intentional fall of consciousness, instead, it is the falling from consciousness to unconsciousness. The mechanism allows the unconsciousness to rise from within, just as it falls willingly to the embrace of unconsciousness.