When the evolution of an individual’s thinking and the overwhelming spirit of the times negotiate with one another, the balance in that person’s thinking gradually breaks down. Through objective experience and original visual expression, “Contemplate Horizon” strives to create a pure epic theater of subjective consciousness. If painting is the projection of inner consciousness onto a two-dimensional plane, then sculpture is a spatial interaction that begins with our relationships to objects and digital video is the reshaping of perceptions of narrative and space through technology.

In her Untitled series, Wang Xuan juxtaposes everyday objects with classical European oil paintings. She combines elements that were originally unrelated through what she calls “undifferentiated embedding.” Classic images from art history are inserted into strange or representational still lifes, while traces of seemingly faulty contemporary technologies drift around the outsides of the works in an absurd yet harmonious way. After events have voluntarily multiplied and layered themselves in time, she randomly cuts a cross-section. When all of the fragments of ideas that arise without warning or portent are stacked on the same plane, the resulting space creates a visual and intellectual deception.

Dai Dandan’s works are full of rationally woven and perfectly ordered matrices. She uses an almost primitive, manual technique to imbue “soft” textiles with rigorous logic and a rhythmic kind of arrangement, entanglement, and interweaving, which runs perfectly counter to her original concept and toward the other extreme.

Fu Shuai’s work happens to share Dai’s approach. He attempts to transcend the limitations of painting’s methods and materials by very carefully depicting the surface texture of steel: hard, cold, orderly, and non-negotiable. With the visual impact of their work, the two artists try their best to break through logical frameworks, intentionally creating conflict with the fundamental tension in nature and opening a window to perceptual ways of looking.

Huang Bingjie uses a more primitivist style in her works, choosing to employ casual, rough methods to explore and express inflexible visual elements in the contemporary context. Taking a perspective that is refined yet evades domestication, she does not shy away from the softer moods in life. Instead, she extracts and portrays fragments of the everyday in a humorous, adorable tone.

Jia Pengsen’s videos feature clearly demarcated sections and careful, distinct digital trails, which seem to form organic, magnificent scenes of nature that suddenly collapse and fall away. The works showcase the breadth and grandeur of nature and its collapse upon meeting the programmed digital world. In that moment, viewers are unable to escape or refute it.

These young artists present their work differently, but they all begin with a subjective consciousness, strip away external experience, and directly portray the things that they see. The real, visible objects that they have created are not governed by a fixed rationale or standard; they are within the horizon, in theaters constructed by consciousness.