Artist Qi Le's first solo exhibition at Arch Gallery revisits the traces of her memories with a magnified and distinct emotional impulse: the old days of her childhood spent in the mountains are constantly re-affirmed in her dreams and creations. These dusty perceptions come to us through time, the impulse to return to the mountains, and the attachment and fear from the depths of memory. They are intertwined to form the face of the whole exhibition, and the curator translates and converges the implicit rambling expressions in these works to become "Glittering Signals".
We will be closing this exhibition this Sunday, and it will be closed to the public from July 29 to August 10, with the new exhibition opening on the evening of August 11, 2024, when everyone is welcome to be there. As we approach the closing stages of the exhibition, we follow the contributors' perspectives back to the exhibition.
Art Triggers the Illusion of Self-Knowledge
As Qi Le’s first solo exhibition, it focuses on showcasing how the artist brings back to reality the dust-laden memories unearthed from her inner self, sensory experiences, and perceptions of nature and intimate relationships. To this end, the exhibition handles the rhythm of feelings with delicate techniques and, through sensory cues, invites viewers to boldly explore the gallery in a more sensory approach—wandering through grass slopes scattered with white strawberries, wading through cold rivers, and returning to the origin of all tangible and intangible life forms presented in the artworks.
Just as the intense feelings implied by "Shimmering Signals" suggest, beyond the coding and decoding of symbolic systems that we are accustomed to in contemporary art, the exhibition brings more experiences occurring beneath consciousness, resembling a vibrant live-action drama. With its distinct perceptible qualities, the gallery space stimulates viewers’ comprehension and imagination of the visual symbol system the artist repeatedly employs and practices in her creative process.
The works on display in this exhibition are divided into four sections: Shimmering, White Strawberries, Dreams, and Bodily Perception. Guided by Shimmering—the embodiment of Qi Le’s intuitive power, a living entity hovering at the spiritual level of the experiential world—viewers are led to delve deeper step by step.
Entering the gallery, the first sight is the bright daylight of a May mountain wilderness where white strawberries ripen, jointly created by the bright natural light of midsummer and the gallery’s lighting. The slight elevation difference around the original single step in the gallery serves as the boundary separating daylight from dusk. As the exploration deepens gradually, at the entrance to the inner compartment, the Sensory Series are hung in concentration under the red visual guiding color. After passing through the disturbance of moths in the half-awake, half-asleep state of late night, what we finally enter is a cold-light dreamscape beyond reality.
Level One: Fresh White Strawberries in Sunlight
In the first level space of the exhibition, we taste this wild fruit—one that ripens in mid-to-late May and wilts and spoils just 10 hours after ripening—in places where white strawberries shouldn’t grow. Its perishable nature makes it almost impossible to transport beyond the mountainous regions of southern Gansu where the artist, Qi Le, grew up. Precisely because of this trait, Qi Le derives a profound sense of the passage of time from the plump, fresh state of these wild fruits. To her, each fresh, plump white strawberry is an imprint of a specific time, space, and identity. They are fragile lives that awaken when she wanders among them, fall silent when she leaves her hometown, and exist within specific time, space, and triggering conditions.
Qi Le uses abundant white, pink, green, along with vivid forms and lines to depict the feelings this counterpart evokes in her, endowing it with powerful spirituality and vitality, and even bestowing elegance and beauty upon it.
In the artwork In the 《Rainy Night Waiting for the Boat》, the surprise and excitement brought to her by wild white strawberries from her childhood in the outdoors are expressed through enormous white strawberries, as if this still evokes the same ecstatic joy as it did in the past. Yet this dazzling adventure under sunlight does not exist in any place in the present; instead, it is the artist’s arduous effort of re-exploring inwardly, thus imparting an Arcadian sense of distance. The Dream Series work Nikes Wandering, hung in the first level, seems to want to remind us of this. Together with 《Grandmother》, they gaze across at the other side of Qi Le’s heart—those unfulfilled dreams and memories that have lingered since adulthood.
Level Two: Withered White Strawberries by the Riverbank
As dusk falls, white strawberries irreversibly shrink and fall away, and Shimmering hides itself too. In this second section, we fall into the water along with all the melting, withering white strawberries. Qi Le’s grandmother once tried to preserve fresh white strawberries by freezing them for Qi Le, who was studying in a foreign land, yet they, like time itself, refused to stay. Here, all the shrunken white strawberries become a counterpart blending temporal-spatial distance with deeper familial affection.
The second section is a space of lingering. Hanging at the transitional position is 《Shadows of Ten Thousand Moons》—the image filling the frame resembles the colossal human figure Salvador Dalí created in 《The Premonition of Civil War》. While Qi Le was painting this work, she received news of a loved one’s passing. In the lower left corner of the painting, white strawberries shrink and darken. Night falls, a loved one calls, and white stones form a circle beneath the steps—it is time to cross the water and return home.
Level Three: Night Where the Body Precedes Consciousness
Before night finally arrives, the transitional work 《Night Talk》 documents the alternation of symbolic systems between day and night, dreams and reality. Before white moths take over our senses and meanings, all counterparts occupy equal positions and sit in a circle during this fleeting moment.
With the arrival of night come white moths flapping their wings. On many half-asleep, half-awake mountain nights, white-glowing moths occupied all of Qi Le’s senses. The Sensory Series are signals perceived by the body before consciousness—they amplify these buzzing, itching, and stinging sensations, reimagining them through visual and display language. In the design of the exhibition’s circulation path, these works occupy the position of a “passageway.” As the exhibition progresses deeper, it is also a process of gradually drawing closer to the source of these signals.
Level Four: Plunging into the Deep Dream
The source of the signals lies beneath surface consciousness—Qi Le’s creative practice often draws on experiences of dreams. At the deepest part of the gallery lie memories and dreams that directly point to childhood. The Dream Series, which embody the artist’s many dim sorrows and reflections, are displayed in a cold, bright white space. Here, the contrast between the color tone and the one-story-high ceiling height renders the spatial experience cramped and unreal.
We also encounter Charon here, the counterpart to Shimmering—a real childhood toy. This messenger of the subconscious realm is introduced to us at the conclusion of the exhibition, pointing to 《Lot’s Wife》, which depicts deep dreams, and 《Life as a new comer》—the experience closest to white strawberries in the artist’s early creative process.
Beneath a sour cherry tree at her residency in Germany, when Qi Le touched a cherry pit with her fingers, she was first struck by childhood memories. The longing for emotions, memories, and hometown, arising from pitted cherries, began to spread outward like ripples. They first lingered at her fingertips and in her throat, haunted countless nights, stalled in those faded feelings, and finally arrived before us in a brand-new form, with a sense of thrill and freshness.
