BONIAN SPACE presents Spreading Growth, a group exhibition curated by curator SHI Yurui and ZHANG Shuhan.
Trauma cannot be cured; one can only learn to live with it. —— Judith Herman
In the language of psychoanalysis, trauma is never fully healed; it is merely rewrapped by time and memory. Freud’s notion of repetition compulsion reveals how the human mind unconsciously reconstructs and returns to painful experiences. We repeatedly reach out to mend the ruptures in our lives, only to find ourselves caught in new cycles of substitution. Lacan further points out that in the “mirror stage,” the subject constructs the self through the image of the Other, thus drifting ever farther from the real self.
Spreading Growth unfolds precisely within this dual psychological and philosophical context. The exhibition focuses on narratives of “persistent trauma”, trauma not as a sudden event, but as a slow seepage, a process that accumulates through repair and mutates through extension. The artists’ works respond to this temporally stretched ache: their canvases, videos, and installations gently trace an unhealed texture, visually recording the folds of emotion and the echoes of lived experience.
The starting point of the exhibition is the individual’s desire to prove themselves “not incomplete.” Yet the notion of lack exists not only within individuals, but also within human collectives. As civilization progresses, people impose ever-greater forms of perfection upon themselves. We attempt to repair flaws and erase absences, but such efforts, paradoxically, often generate new traumas.
In the ceaseless pursuit of filling what is missing, can we truly achieve reconstruction? Or are we still fundamentally limited in our resistance to absence?
In this exhibition, we open the possibility of returning to memory so as to confront the hidden wound at its source.
Many of the works on view respond to this psychological structure across different registers, from personal experience and family memory to social systems and technological futures. Rachel Ho’s Marriage begins with her mother’s wedding dress. The pure fabric resembles both a bandage and an unspoken wound. By revisiting this matrilineal history, she transforms the dress from a “symbol of blessing” into an act of “binding trauma,” making rebirth a process inseparable from tearing. LIN Kaixuan’s Faith Woven and I Would Like to Dance With They in Midnight use subtle shifts in posture and repositioned gazes to address women’s experiences of being seen and disciplined within family structures, traditional aesthetics, and social norms. She restores subjectivity to the bodies in her paintings, making trauma the starting point for reclaiming one’s narrative. WANG Zhongyao’s Flesh uses technologically “frozen” skin as a metaphor for the fissures that open in contemporary bodies caught between the desire to delay decay and the pursuit of immortality, revealing new forms of wounds produced by technological intervention. ZHANG Ziyi’s 01/13/2024 Pencil Lead and 09/02/2024 Grass employ cutting, layering, and embedded text to allow memory to emerge like a pencil tip slowly worn down, delayed, fractured, rewritten, showing how emotion lingers, echoes, and recomposes itself over time.
In LI Zhuoheng’s large painting New-Nursery Rhymes, innocent children at play contrast sharply with technological conduits extending beyond the canvas. The work reveals how subjects growing up in the digital age are subtly shaped by invisible structures, their childhood joy stained with an undercurrent of pain. Zeleo ZHAO’s kinetic installation Blank Time loosens time itself from everyday measurement through sand, machinery, and deconstructed timepieces. Time becomes a faint yet persistent tremor, fragmented, prolonged, and nearly imperceptible, yet never entirely gone, much like trauma itself. In ZHANG Bin’s Whisper, fluorescent pigments overwrite old objects. As night falls, memories glow back into visibility, allowing the wounds between individuals and villages, personal emotion and collective history, to surface in the dark as a quiet but profound inquiry.
Some works extend trauma beyond the individual to broader systems. XIAO Liang’s Eco-Mutualism uses looping rhythms and destabilized temporality to explore the fissures between civilization and nature. It raises an open-ended question: Can trauma become an entry point for new forms of growth? Trauma becomes a metaphor for ecology, civilization, and futurity. PEI Yankai’s Bedded on Cotton Wool depicts an AI caregiver obsessively tending to the deceased, presenting a form of “delayed grief.” Technology both soothes and prolongs, turning death from a finite closure into an absence endlessly extended through everyday repetition.
Taken together, these works do not form a simple map of trauma. Rather, they constitute a slow, continuous, and irreversible structure of Spreading Growth, trauma that spreads, mutates, and expands, becoming a pathway toward rethinking the body, technology, time, and identity. Spreading Growth is ultimately an exhibition about lack, but even more so, an inquiry into existence itself.
