“When thou lookest on the stars, my star, oh! would I were the heavens and could see thee with a thousand eyes.” —— As cited by Hegel in Lectures on Aesthetics, Vol. III, attributed to Plato’s cry to Argus, the Hundred-Eyed Giant¹

YIN Zi’ang once said, “I want both the Dionysian frenzy and the Apollonian clarity.” Frenzy is not chaos, but the surging vitality of life; clarity is the luminous transparency that art demands from the depths of the soul. These two longings reach a delicate equilibrium beneath the brief veil of night. In the dark, the artist does not struggle or resist; he relinquishes every impulse to fight and sinks into the blackness — ever deeper — because there lies what he seeks: the wondrous, the fearful, the viscous, even the dialectical beauty. For him, what is essential about beauty does not reside in its dazzling moments of brilliance, but in those fleeting glimpses of what might have been lost in memory.

In the stillness of the night, where light drifts and shadows breathe, YIN Zi’ang’s brushwork alternates between the gentleness of a breath — tracing the quiver of light — and the turbulence of a torrent — building layers like strata of rock. Viewed up close, one feels the texture of touch and light; from afar, forests, beasts, insects, limbs, the moon, and constellations emerge. His visual language hovers between abstraction and figuration, echoing the essence of the night itself — both inclusive and dissolving, both sheltering and unsettling. The revelations that arise from his night are never acts of escape; rather, they are fertile chaos: desires ignite and fade, memories fragment and reform. They merge into “a colored whirlpool of life,” collapsing at last into a black hole — miraculously shortening the distance between one inner universe and another.

The artist believes that true painting should act directly upon the viewer’s bodily senses, not through intellectual comprehension. To observe inwardly one’s own reactions to an image is an indispensable step in creation: when the brush touches the canvas, does the vision seen and the tactile subtlety felt — the entire body even shake under some unknown force? This is the condition necessary for him to paint: if it appears, he pursues it relentlessly; if not, he abandons the work. Confronting the feelings within makes YIN Zi’ang’s painting process a kind of ontogenetic practice — the image is not premeditated, but slowly emerges through continual probing and adjustment. This process resembles the act of fishing, which the artist deeply adores. Under moonlight, on the lake of the subconscious and the conscious, he casts his line — the brush — using color as bait, seeking through each rhythmic motion that ancient tryst: painting as his counterpart, as an eternal language — to be sensed, to be awaited.

“Hold back the dawn,” he murmurs while painting deep into the night — the phrase stirs something ancient — buried, but not gone. They speak of the beginning of life, when we were all born from the same primordial darkness, wrapped in a viscous membrane, encrusted with remnants of stardust. Still, we linger — suspended between heaven and earth. As the Italian saying goes, Per l'amaro e il dolce — “for the bitter as well as the sweet.” Cherish every tremor of the night, and feel, with an upturned gaze, the stirring of distant stars — and the first, unseen pulse of the unknown. As the creator of these puzzles, ZHANG interprets on the exhibition's title: " 'Smoke and Mirrors' does not depict a specific event or space, but instead offers a visual empty seat. Here, images and language do not simply annotate one another but generate new possibilities through mutual uncertainties. For me, ambiguity, hesitation, and pause are not obstacles in the creative process; they are where the narrative truly begins."

1 引自于G.W.F. Hegel: Aesthetics. p. 153 但是学术界指其为 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 的“伪引 用”Diogenes Laertius 的 Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers(Book III, Plato section)或误归柏拉图。