Curatorial Statement

Memory, the Hand, and Narratives of Life brings together three serial bodies of work: two albums made in 2023 and a recent suite of eight panels titled New Xiao-Xiang Eight Views. The exhibition approaches painting not as representation but as a viewing interface. On paper, acrylic, watercolor, pencil, and oil are layered, veiled, erased, incised, and revised so that the image emerges and recedes through time. Meaning is produced less by depicted objects than by a choreography of attention—distance, angle, and raking light turn looking into a form of reading.

The first album begins with ordinary vessels—bottles and jars—magnified into architectural presences. Through scalar translation, the everyday container becomes a structure that “holds” life, shifting still life into a meditation on dwelling and capacity. The second album takes the hand as both method and question: the technical hand can build civilization, yet it can also generate ruin; it is simultaneously an instrument of making and a site of fracture and repair. New Xiao-Xiang Eight Views does not restage Song “poetic scenery.” It reprograms the Eight Views into protocols of visibility—mist, rain, snow, moonlight, sound, and fading light become operative conditions under which an image becomes legible. Here, the landscape is not simply depicted; it is produced by organized viewing.

Artist Bio

Anjing He is an Associate Professor at the University of Science and Technology Beijing, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard FAS CAMLab. He holds a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of World Religions, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His research and artistic practice engage with Chinese and Western philosophy, particularly aesthetics, material culture, and the relationship between art and lived experience. He is a member of the China Artists Association.

Exhibition Information

• Free and open to the public
• June 18th (Thursday)
• 2:00 – 5:00 PM ET