Cave of the Day, Cave of the Night
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Cave of the Day, Cave of the Night
A cave is a living thing. It absorbs, restores, immanently transforms.
Featuring the artists Bonan Li, Bowen Li, and Gumi Lu, Cave of the Day, Cave of the Night is a collaborative project centered around the act of cave-making. The exhibition began with a simple question: How do we navigate a world that feels increasingly fragile, out of touch, and entangled with forces beyond our control?
Spanning fabric sculptures, multimedia installations, sketches, and projections, the exhibition transforms the gallery space into a meditative cave that is constantly reconfiguring. It doesn’t merely embrace light and harmony but also confronts scars, pain, secrecy, and unanswered questions.
The three artists, with their diverse backgrounds and mediums, approach materials intuitively, exploring the delicate balance between body and nature, agency and control, and the visible and hidden emotional-material networks surrounding us. These explorations are deeply intertwined with their precarious, sometimes disorienting diasporic experiences, revealing an innate empathy toward the materials they engage with and the connections they forge. Whether it’s Bonan’s earthy landscapes, Bowen’s river of remembrance, or Gumi’s machinic bodies, the works prompt us to rethink the notion of agency—not as a possession of individuals or objects, but as a relationship. As Karen Barad suggests, agency is tied to response-ability—the ethical accountability involved in reconfiguring entanglements, which inherently includes the power imbalances that cannot be romanticized or ignored.
Inspired by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, the exhibition offers two parallel narratives: the cave of the day and the cave of the night. This setting evokes a liminal space where more than one reality exists simultaneously. The stories behind the artworks are embedded within each version, and you are invited to choose your path based on intuition and feeling.
However, remember that each visitor may choose only one version at any given time during their visit. Each narrative reveals its own truth while concealing the other. Once you enter your chosen version, the other becomes inaccessible, and its presence is felt only by its absence.
The sense of response-ability—the power to affect and be affected—is therefore enacted throughout the cave. You will witness how material, semiotic, and emotional forces converge to create new realities. Yet, you must also reconcile with the fact that by choosing one version, you are relinquishing the insights of the excluded other. From the moment you make your choice, the cave invites you to explore its tentacular possibilities, guided by your body and instincts.
Here, you're not just a spectator, but part of the unfolding.
So, which will you choose—the cave of the day, or the cave of the night?
Chiarina Chen, Curator