Xiangwang and Seeing ——Perception in the Post-Image Era

By Bao Yu

In the rapid transformation of contemporary visual culture, the status of the image is being redefined. With the expansion of generative technologies, digital media and the global visual network, the visual environment we inhabit has gradually shifted from a simple “world of images” to what may be called the Post-Image Era. In this phase, images are no longer merely records of reality, nor do they exist only as objects of viewing. Instead, they increasingly become part of the very perceptual field that surrounds us. Images are not only what we see; they also shape the way we see the world.

Against such a background, the task of contemporary art has also changed. If art in the past was constantly creating new images, the question today has gradually moved to another level: in an age where images are everywhere, how does one relearn to see?

This exhibition revolves around this question.

In the practice of Chi Wing Lo, architecture, sculpture and painting are not separate mediums, but different phases within a single system of thought. As an architect, he has long worked in a field that demands precision and structural logic. An architectural idea must gradually take concrete form through materials, structures and techniques, and be continuously revised and refined in the process of construction. Yet, as he has pointed out, architecture is not merely a product of rational systems. Within the choices of proportion, rhythm, spatial sequence and the relationship between light and shadow, there always exists a dimension that cannot be fully derived from logic. This dimension comes from intuition, experience and aesthetic judgment, transforming architecture from a purely technical exercise into an artistic and poetic act.

It is at this level that sculpture and painting enter his creative system. They offer a freer and more speculative terrain for the imagination, allowing art to explore beyond the immediate constraints of physical construction.

Chi Wing Lo’s early sculptural works, created in wood with mortise-and-tenon structures, present a spatial form that is at once stable and ethereal. Components, whether slender or voluminous, support one another in space, forming an upward-extending structural order. Yet the true core of these works lies not in the material or structure itself, but in the space enclosed and suggested by the structure. Visually, the sculptures appear to be made of wood, yet experientially, they are more like a state of being shaped by emptiness.

This spatial consciousness resonates deeply with ideas in Eastern philosophy. In traditional Chinese thought, “emptiness” is not absence, but a condition through which all things come into being and flow. Structure is not meant to fill space, but to create boundaries for the void. It is within this relationship between the void and the solid that space acquires a rhythm like breathing, lending the sculptures a calm and open temperament.

If sculpture constructs space through structure, painting embarks on another exploration at the level of the image. The new series of paintings continues the imagination of an unknown world from his earlier works, while translating such imagination into a more fluid visual language. Forms in the paintings often hover between emergence and dissolution, resembling relics from an ancient civilization or images of a future yet to come. Many works take their titles from the literary world of Jorge Luis Borges, where countless imaginary beings form an encyclopedia suspended between reality and fantasy. Yet in Chi Wing Lo’s paintings, these forms no longer carry grotesque or fearful connotations; they have gradually transformed into quiet and introspective presences.

In the Post-Image Era, such an experience of the image is particularly significant. As visual systems increasingly tend to produce clear, fast and recognizable images, art instead cultivates a slower way of seeing. Here, the image is not the end of a fixed narrative, but a continuously unfolding perceptual space, moving the viewer between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

The exhibition title “Xiangwang and Seeing” offers an important philosophical clue to understanding this practice. “Xiangwang” comes from the ancient Chinese classic Zhuangzi, the episode of Xiangwang retrieving the pearl, symbolizing a state of perception freed from established frameworks of knowledge. When one temporarily sets aside analysis, method and concepts, the world can reveal itself in a more open manner. This state is not a rejection of knowledge, but a possibility for perception to regain its freedom. In a highly systematized contemporary society, this way of seeing is particularly crucial. As technology continuously advances efficiency and predictability, art still upholds an alternative path of cognition: a mode of perception that makes room for intuition, imagination and the unknown.

This exhibition is therefore not a closed narrative, but rather an experiment in seeing, in which structure and image, reason and intuition, history and future continuously refract one another. The works do not attempt to provide clear answers, but create an open viewing environment that invites the audience to rethink visual experience itself.

Let us stay back and comprehend ourselves and the world like Xiangwang.