BONIAN SPACE is going to present artist SHEN Tongzhou’s solo project Odyssey on May 22, 2026. Curated by Rabbi Wang, the project will feature a long-term, continuous painting practice developed alongside SHEN’s video-based work, including the eight explorations since the start of Odyssey, a special offshoot of the project, and the poster painted by the artist specifically for this exhibition. As a Gen Z artist who grew up surrounded by digital information, SHEN began with a simple curiosity: if one keeps clicking and watching along the automatic recommendations of everyday media stream, where will one eventually “surf” to? From this question, he transforms repeated acts of recommendation and browsing into a serial form of “landscape sketching.” The exhibition will remain on view through June 18, inviting viewers to take part in this odyssey together.

“Actually, at the very beginning, I was probably just dizzy from scrolling through too many videos. Then I suddenly thought: what if I just kept clicking the next video and kept watching, like always clicking the first recommended video on YouTube? I was curious where it would eventually lead. But I also felt that maybe I needed a way to record it, so I thought I might as well draw these video covers quickly, almost like doing landscape sketches. The images left behind would also become traces of my attention.” “One time that really stayed with me was when I was drawing a lot of meme remix videos on Bilibili. Surprisingly, most of them were among the top 100 most-viewed videos in Bilibili’s history. Then Zhang Xuefeng appeared, and somehow the meme videos led into Chinese postgraduate entrance exam videos—from meme-edited Zhang Xuefeng to Zhang Xuefeng simply giving a lecture. Then, all of a sudden, I was taken out of Bilibili and redirected to a postgraduate exam advertising website.” “Now I’ve slowly started to see it as something like sketching from a ‘window’ in my spare time. But for me, it’s not only a painting project. It also feels like a performance, or like a video unfolding across time. As I kept doing it, I began to wonder: am I the one setting the rules to watch and record these images, or are the images setting the rules to watch and record me…”

“Odyssey” refers to a long journey filled with uncertainty. In Odyssey, SHEN Tongzhou intervenes in the rapidly moving interface of streaming media through hand-drawn painting, transforming images that are immediate, lightweight, and destined to be refreshed and overwritten into traces that can be looked at and contemplated. When displayed in sequence, these paintings give the fleeting moments of the information stream a renewed sense of time, body, and intensity of looking. Though these video covers may seem insignificant, their continuous accumulation gradually forms a scroll like image of each new present, allowing hidden connections between different fields, regions, and global issues to emerge. What Odyssey ultimately leaves behind may not be an answer to the end of streaming media, but a record of our time: of how we are watched, guided, and shaped by information.