On Coexistence: The Poetics of Difference
The Beijing unit of the 2024 Hong Kong-Macau Visual Art Biennale, titled On Coexistence: The Poetics of Difference, opens with a pressing question: in a world increasingly connected yet fracturing along political, environmental, and technological fault lines, what does it mean to live together?
Curated by Naiyi Wang, the exhibition moves beyond a celebration of diversity to confront the generative friction of difference. It takes as its conceptual compass "archipelagic thinking"—not as metaphor but as method. Islands are separate yet connected by the same waters; each work in this exhibition stands as its own territory, but together they trace a shared, turbulent sea of relations. Spanning painting, sculpture, collage, light, and digital media, the nine featured artists resist both smooth totality and fragmented isolation, instead proposing a relational reality that is constantly renegotiated.
Rather than reconciling contradictions, On Coexistence inhabits them: the local and the global, the individual and the collective, the natural and the technological, the ancestral and the speculative.
Identity as Becoming
Several works interrogate identity as a fluid, contested process. Chen Zhou’s Traveling Amid appropriates classical Chinese landscape painting only to hollow out its stable subject. The traveler disappears, leaving only footprints—a wandering consciousness without fixed form or destination, an allegory for the digital subject perpetually adrift between the virtual and the real.
Yang Mushi’s Welding – Piece turns industrial waste into "non-productive labor." The visible flaws and weld marks index the body’s resistance against seamless, homogenized systems—individuality as deliberate imperfection.
Wang Sishun’s ongoing series Apocalypse collects stone forms that resemble portraits: ancient sages, alien beings, geological accidents. Through accumulation, the artist transforms found matter into a temporary cultural symbol. Identity here is not essence, but the transient outcome of collision.
Nature as Recoding
If technology has reshaped ecological ethics, these artists respond with a two-way deconstruction. Lisa Chang Lee’s World Atlas series turns colonial plant migration into digital collage. Layering knowledge systems, the work questions the impulse to name, classify, and control—nature and the Other alike.
Yang Song’s NGC4256 and iOS Snow Mountain use high-speed rotating sculptures to approach the speed of light, where form collapses into an impenetrable phantom. This physics-based metaphor critiques the data deluge of information capitalism: the more acceleration, the less reality. Entropy as aesthetic.
Qi Zhen’s interactive installation Sunday, Breeze wraps technological unease in poetic surfaces. Swipe, click, tap—but who designed the path? The work quietly exposes how perception itself is pre-encoded, and agency eroded by algorithmic comfort.
Tradition as Remapping
Lin Fanglu’s She’s Red Gradient reworks traditional plant-dyeing and shibori techniques. The red gradient maps not only color but female affect, labour, and lineage. Wrinkles and stitches become embodied memory, transmitted through craft rather than discourse.
Shen Shaomin, Liu Shaoshan, and Shen Tongyi’s Theatre of Light constructs a non-symbolic language of light—brightness, colour temperature, pulse—as a vehicle for emotion and intelligence. Rejecting anthropocentric communication, it proposes a more-than-human mode of relation, echoing the Daoist notion of "great form without shape."
Shi Danqing’s 100m INK TREE: A Carbon Monument Sketching 1450 Years of Life bridges drone calligraphy and point-cloud data to resurrect the ecological epic of a giant cypress in southern Tibet. The traditional "spirit-writing" of ink landscape is algorithmically rewritten into a carbon-neutral monument—an elegy for the community of life on Earth.
Coexistence Without Consensus
On Coexistence does not argue for harmony. It argues for productive tension. Difference here is not a problem to be solved, but a force of generation—as Gilles Deleuze once reminded us, difference is not opposition, but the very power of becoming.
The exhibition offers no conclusion, only an open question: in difference, how do we live together?
