Like Air for Breath
Exhibition/Curation/Exhibition Graphics/Panel WorkshopFeb-March 2025 Shanghai Third Street Gallery
How do we breathe and move through the tangled disarray? We merge, so intently, into nature's pulse, our bodies drifting at the edges of feeling. Air drawn in, then exhaled into water. The body, a vessel, seeks its own fissure, to plunge into the conversation between site and air, absorbed by the cadence of breath. In the dance of light and shadow, we are here, yet not here—always, endlessly, telling the story of how we enter, what bridges the divide, and what unfolds in the act of becoming.
Like air for breath, consciousness, perception, thought, and behavior are omnipresent, constantly needed, yet often overlooked. In this exhibition, everyday phenomena are awakened and brought into focus. As beings who interact with the natural world, humans are perpetually forming connections with themselves, others, and the surrounding, generating new understandings.
The objects, incidents, and actions that serve as the connections are often referred to as intuition. Through our interactions with the world, we define the things we relate to, imbuing them with language, meaning, and emotion. Yet, these things have no inherent intent of their own. It is this lack of intent that allows the absurd and the unusual to become witnesses to art.
The exhibition emphasizes overlooked perspectives and the search for essence, guiding viewers to new perceptions. Two artists, each exploring their own connections to self and the world, employ diverse media and expressive techniques to offer audiences an experience of free exploration and boundless imagination.
Observe with closed eyes, touch with the heart.
The Metaphor of Sand: Walking, Watching, and Witnessing
Installation/Multimedia, 18:02:00
Helen Jiayu Zhang and Chenxin Cai
2025
An interactive installation with performance screening meant to be projected in space. It invites audiences to explore the relationship between body, mind, and environment. Sand fills the space as both material and medium, shifting roles depending on audience interaction, while stones function as symbolic and functional objects—tools, seats, sculptures, or ritual forms. The sculptural objectc within space connect with the action of “zero-degree art” in the video, which acts as transition.
Video footage situates the stone in three sites (beach, construction site, stone bridge), connecting natural and human contexts. Through participation—touching, moving, imagining—audiences become both performers and observers. The Metaphor of Sand: Walking, Watching, and Witnessing emphasizes direct bodily perception, personal interpretation, and the transformation of everyday actions into acts of self-awareness and artistic experience.
Water Woods
Chenxin Cai
Site-specific installtion
2024
How do we sense boundaries—between the self and the air, the body and the site? Experience fragments through physicality: a tree watered, a sound heard, a rhythm felt. Yet, nature resists language; its preence cannot be wholly described. In the dark or above ground, watching and listening transcend articulation—moments dissolve, unspoken yet known.
Tree
Chenxin Cai
Two-channel video, 15:20:00
2024
[4:42pm. - 5:58pm. 11/28/2024] One of the days during the two-week performance
“The tree is both a medium and a self-contained entity. I am in the air, water is in the air, sound is in the air. Within the site of the tree, we circulate and mimic a natural rhythm. One tree encounters another. Under the shelter of the trees, I blend myself into the natural rhythm and constantly relocate myself in this enduring discourse. I navigate through their encounter, navigate between the sound of trees and the sound of my bodily presence, in and out. Swiftly or still, the trees sound together, weaving me into the entanglement and circulation of the air.”
The water comes from the lake,
moves toward the tree,
and in between is the person.
-Chenxin Cai
moves toward the tree,
and in between is the person.
-Chenxin Cai