“Memory is not a repository of preserved facts, but a continuously generative condition. It becomes blurred through processes of forgetting, reconfiguration, and displacement—like a mineral filtered by time—and through this blurring acquires a fluid, kinetic force. I begin from multiple versions of myself situated across different temporal moments, pointing toward a mode of being that resists fixation—one that is constantly shifting and forming between the past, the present, and what has yet to arrive. How, then, do I become who I am now at the threshold where past, present, and future converge?”
— KONG Huidong
BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the solo exhibition, Murmuration, by the artist KONG Huidong, from January 17 to February 14, 2026. Curated by WANG Yaoli, the exhibition unfolds through three interwoven conceptual strands—the Unreached, time blurred through memory, and the fluid self. Through pictorial spaces structured by non-linear temporality, the exhibition constructs a multilayered inquiry into existence, time, and the continual formation of subjectivity.
Within KONG Huidong’s practice, the Unreached functions as an expansive spatial motif oriented outward. Recurrent images of landscapes glimpsed through windows, distant horizons, and inaccessible exterior spaces do not operate as representations of geographic distance, but as psychological and temporal projections—toward the future and toward unrealized potential. Prolonged immersion within the studio and within self-imposed systems of order renders these distant spaces sites of tension: apertures through which desire for movement, change, and possibility is articulated.
These exterior scenes are frequently situated within indeterminate temporal thresholds—moments that evoke sunrise or sunset without fully resolving into either. They mark transitional conditions in which darkness shifts toward light, or light recedes into darkness. Time here is unstable and liminal, suspended between arrival and deferral, oscillating between stasis and flow. For the artist, such temporal ambiguity constitutes the internal logic of the Unreached, allowing future potentiality to surface within the pictorial field.
In counterpoint to these exterior spaces, the interior elements within KONG Huidong’s paintings are derived from memory. Objects and scenes do not function as direct representations of lived reality, but as forms repeatedly sedimented, eroded, and transformed by time. Memory appears not as loss, but as a softened mode of truth—blurred through temporal filtration and thereby rendered more essential. These interior elements register how past experiences have shaped the artist’s subjectivity, while simultaneously revealing how those experiences are reconfigured over time, becoming increasingly translucent, distant, and open to recomposition.
Across KONG Huidong’s paintings, past, present, and future are not organized into discrete temporal registers, but interlace through layered and permeable structures. The future manifests as the Unreached, gazing inward through windows; the past accumulates as residual traces embedded within interior space; and the present emerges through the artist’s sustained acts of looking, selection, and revision. The pictorial space thus resists localization, operating instead as a temporal field capable of accommodating multiple durations simultaneously.
The notion of the fluid self emerges as the exhibition’s conceptual anchor. Rather than asserting a stable or coherent identity, KONG Huidong approaches painting as a means of registering ongoing processes of self-transformation. The interior, as a marker of established order, and the exterior, as an index of potential futures, are brought into deliberate juxtaposition within the same pictorial framework. This relationship is neither escapist nor confrontational; it functions instead as a continuous process of self-calibration. Over time, identity is shown to be repeatedly shaped, extended, fractured, and reassembled.
The exhibition title, Murmuration, derives from the natural phenomenon in which large groups of starlings move collectively through the sky at dusk. Countless individuals continuously adjust their proximity and trajectory, producing complex formations without a central authority or fixed pattern, yet sustaining a cohesive order through perpetual motion. A recurring sight during KONG Huidong’s years of study in Italy, the murmuration here becomes a structural metaphor for existence itself. As reflected in his work, past, present, and future remain in constant mutual refraction, while the self resists fixation—remaining responsive between order and indeterminacy, continually recalibrating its orientation and persistently coming into being.
