Partition

May 14 - May 22, 2022
Curated by Luna Wenxin Xu 徐雯莘
Artist: Luna Wenxin Xu

Partition & Mirage is a two-part project that treats the gallery not as a neutral room but as a situation—an apparatus that paces what can be revealed, when, and to whom. Installed back-to-back at Puzzle Gallery, the works move from withholding to re-appearance: first an engineered pause at the threshold (Partition), then a scene that returns as image and environment (Mirage). At stake is an existential question: how might an exhibition create the conditions for suspension—holding meaning in abeyance long enough for perception and judgment to reset—and open a modest clearing (Lichtung) where things can step forward while concealment still quietly works?

Partition begins at the door. A black, light-tight curtain covers the entrance and street-facing windows; at its centre sits a single lens. From the pavement, passers-by can lean in and glimpse a small, inverted image through this aperture—like a pocket camera obscura that never quite yields certainty. Inside, the next exhibition is being installed. With the roller door raised behind the curtain, the gallery reads as a stage set: the artist, Dean Qiulin Li, and the curator, Luna Wenxin Xu, move through the ordinary labour that usually stays off-stage—measuring, debating, rehanging. Street sounds bleed inward with clarity; fragments of conversation are recorded and later reused.

What looks like obstruction is a temporal device. By narrowing vision and amplifying sound, Partition redistributes attention from finished tableau to lived process. It invites a sustained suspension—neither spectacle nor explanation, but a held-open interval in which onlookers complete the scene with inference and care. The lens does not so much grant access as calibrate it. Its unstable projection, catchable on a scrap of paper or the palm of a hand, reminds us that exhibitions filter and frame—revealing by concealing, disclosing by delaying. The pause is also an ethic: it paces exposure, converts curiosity into listening, and treats the threshold as something that can be composed rather than simply crossed.

Mirage resumes where Partition leaves off, turning the pause into an image you can walk into. At the centre of the room, a photograph is printed on semi-translucent fabric: a camping chair, a can of VB, staged plants, a milk crate, and artificial moonlight. Hung in space, the fabric glows and draws the eye. Behind it, the same scene is rebuilt in three dimensions—chair, crate, plants—under neon and theatrical lights. Image and object sit a few metres apart, nearly the same yet never fully matching; viewers shuttle between them, testing where attention wants to settle.

Atmosphere becomes material. A fog machine folds light into drifting planes that soften edges; synthetic grass carpets the floor, tipping the room toward a constructed outdoors. Through the speakers, environmental recordings captured during Partition—street noise, passing voices—bleed one exhibition’s time into the next. The space remembers. Here photography is treated not as proof but as proposal. The printed fabric carries the photograph’s indexical tug—its promise that this happened—while the rebuilt set asserts how easily this can be staged. Between them, appearance happens as un-concealment (aletheia): never total, always leaving a remainder that stays hidden.

Read together, Partition and Mirage set up a modest clearing—not a grand revelation, but a workable opening in which things can appear without being finalised. The curtain’s delay and the mirage’s doubling keep judgment in suspension long enough for new readings to surface. This resonates with site-responsive practice and the aesthetics of ma or 留白: the interval matters. It is a crafted space—architectural, sonic, atmospheric—where attention can reorganise and where relations can be felt rather than announced.

Exhibition as apparatus, atmosphere as material, and interval as form and ethics all flow together here. The gallery’s façade is both barrier and instrument; what looks closed is, in fact, a tuned device. The photograph is both record and lure; what looks stable is mobile under the pressure of light, air, and sound. The viewer’s task is to walk the weave, to doubt and to enjoy.

If Partition makes the before of exhibition-making audible—its work, drift, contingencies—Mirage makes the after vivid, asking what exactly returns to view when production is recast as scene. The answer is never singular. It sits in a weave: a black curtain and a lens, a fabric print and a rebuilt set, fog that thickens light, turf that changes how a body stands, voices arriving from another week. What looked closed becomes porous; what looked stable starts to move.

For Luna Wenxin Xu, curating here is the composition of thresholds. Sometimes this means closing a door so listening can begin; sometimes it means rebuilding a photograph so looking can deepen. Either way, the work is to hold a space—however small—in which perception can suspend, and the world, for a moment, can step forward into a clearing.