To the Heart of the World
Text/Yuana
Within the territory of present-day Colombia, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta unfolds as an interlaced mountain system. It is not only the highest coastal mountain range in geographical terms, but also, in the worldview of the Indigenous Kogi people, the “Heart of the World”( Gonawindúa)—the source from which all things arise. For them, this mountain range binds together the harmony of the entire Earth; it is the umbilical cord of all life. Once this balance is broken, the order y which the world operates collapses, and humanity’s fate withers alongside it. For centuries, countless explorers have sought paths leading to the “Heart of the World,” longing to witness firsthand the sacred land guarded across generations. Yet the so-called “Heart of the World” never opens itself to conquerors; it reveals itself only to those who understand its fragility and solemnity.
This exhibition presents works by five artists—Chen Zijun, Liu Ourui, Sun Yu, Wang Yuanzheng, and Zhang Liying—taking the Kogi conception of the life cycle as a guiding thread. From the low murmur of creation, through spiritual transmission, to portents of decline and the possibility of rebirth, the imagery of the “Heart of the World” is shifted from a geographical locus toward a more inward dimension. Each work constitutes an act of retrospection and inquiry: within the depths of their own concealed and singular experiences, how do artists discern that core terrain not meant for outsiders? And amid the interweaving of individual emotion, memory, and reality, how is an inner mountain range constructed?
- The Mother of All Things — “Aluna”
The sea was the Mother.
The Mother was not people, she was not anything.
Nothing at all.
She was when she was, darkly.
She was memory and potential.
She was aluna.
— (UK) Alan Ereira, The Elder Brothers
According to the Kogi understanding of the cosmos, “Aluna” is the Mother of all things, existing simultaneously in past and present. In the beginning, the world was a chaotic ocean; through contemplation, the Mother conceived the first life form—like a vast, sentient egg—gradually giving rise to autonomous spirit and intelligence. Later, human beings entered the realm of Aluna through profound meditation, affirming the principle that the phenomena of life and the essence of the universe are mutually unified.
In an era saturated with technology, the latent modes of communication between humans and nature have grown increasingly tenuous. The senses are categorized, language becomes instrumentalized, and experience is dismantled into doctrines. Against this backdrop, Zhang Liying’s practice unfolds as a countervailing exploration. She seeks to reconstruct passages at sites of rupture, devising a perceptual language that traverses species boundaries. The “hybrid life forms” she creates dissolve distinctions among plants, organs, animals, and humans, without being confined to any single species. Emotions, memories, and the unconscious grow, entwine, and reassemble within them. These unfinished structures—some germinating, others tending toward disintegration—bear fissures in clay, uneven surfaces, and traces of growth that sustain a state of ambivalent proximity to reality. Her works are not pastoral idealizations of nature; rather, they pose a question: when we recognize that we still reside within a “maternal body,” how should humanity rethink—and relearn—what it means to become part of nature?
The coco de mer carries a strong mythological charge across diverse cultural systems. In South Asian coastal folklore, it is believed to be a divine tree born from the seabed, visible only on particular moonlit nights or when tides recede. More significantly, the coco de mer possesses one of the largest seeds in the world. Its slow growth cycle, immense accumulation of energy, and the gestation of new life within a hardened shell render it a compelling metaphor for the “maternal body”: enclosure, nourishment, waiting, and birth. The seed is both a sealed totality and the origin point of a latent world, akin to a miniature proto-cosmos. This imagery resonates closely with the Kogi conception described above, allowing the coco de mer to be understood as one manifestation of Aluna. In Zhang Liying’s painting Coco de Mer, the organs of the central figure draw inward to form a ring, sustaining an internal life cycle through slow, almost imperceptible pulsations. Vines and leaves extend perception and consciousness, shaping a self-protective structure. Within the interstitial spaces formed by multiple layers of enclosure lies a great “pearl”—like a contemplative core consciousness, silent yet abundant—continuously gestating unnamed worlds.
- Self-Division and Healing
Since their emergence, human beings have never truly lived in isolation. We once possessed an intimate knowledge of how to seek assistance from the external world: Romans used anemone to reduce fever; Nordic folk traditions employed elderberry to relieve pain; on the African continent, lion fat was used for healing and exorcism. Plants and animals could cure bodily ailments and soothe the soul. Even today, many people continue to rely on traditional plant- and animal-based remedies, grounded in a belief in the interconnectedness of life. As increasing bodies of knowledge are sequestered within laboratories by modern science and technology, the awareness of symbiosis recedes from collective consciousness. In the process of abusing resources, we also deplete the bonds linking humans and nature.
Chen Zijun’s practice seeks to reconstruct a shared primal memory. She refers to herself as a “microcosm” and persistently searches for pathways toward the “macrocosm.” The animals and plants in her work emerge as alter egos growing from within the body: at times a horse, at times a goose, at times a spare bamboo stalk. They “gnaw” at one another day and night until their souls adhere and merge. The layered purples, blues, and greens in her paintings—shimmering like amethyst, sapphire, and emerald—release high-frequency energies associated with nature. Creation becomes a ritual of invocation, calling back suppressed intuition and primordial forces, while also enacting a process of creation and self-recognition. In Painting a Horse, the figure of Ma Liang, traditionally male in myth, is reimagined as a young woman; she is the true creator of reality. Accompanied by birds and beasts, unbound by hierarchy or domestication, barefoot upon skulls whose tactile reality surpasses that of a sofa cushion, she is freer than ever before. She creates a horse without possessing or controlling it; the horse becomes another body through which she inhabits the world, a faithful companion along an extended journey. As they traverse darkness and light side by side, blurred contours are gradually filled in and awakened.
Wang Yuanzheng’s paintings direct attention toward a more intricate inner world. Focusing on dreams, the unconscious, and the collective unconscious, he understands art as a reflection of intuition and mysterious forces rather than the outcome of linear logic. His narratives are therefore fragmentary, mirroring the disorder and strangeness of reality itself. Viewed from the perspective of a windowsill, the Extra Dreams series depicts the world’s clamor and desire; beyond the glass, nature’s essence remains eternally unchanged, a serenity that lies just before the eyes yet remains unreachable. Recurring images of infants, insects, beasts, snails, and pills are reappearances of childhood memory, as well as avatars of the self across different temporalities. Growth unfolds as a series of escape fragments: on one side, a desire to shed former selves; on the other, after the shocks of reality, a longing to return to the shell that once provided warmth and shelter. Tears shed in fear and moments of inner turbulence seem as vivid as yesterday. Lurking daily in the form of dreams, they surface unexpectedly, reminding the individual of vulnerability and longing. Reality and dream interpenetrate to form a closed labyrinth, within which one wanders in search of elusive yet faintly present shadows. Perhaps it is precisely through such disorientation that individuals confront inner fissures and seek remedies for self-repair and healing.
- Sites of Energy Circulation
In the Kogi language there is a word, Esuama, meaning a place where energy gathers, or a place of authority—a sacred site that coordinates harmony between humans and nature. The Kogi understand this as a law governing natural operation: Esuama in the mountains are directly connected to those along the coast. For this reason, materials have long been exchanged between mountain and sea to achieve compensatory cycles of energy—for example, maintaining contact with the ocean by consuming calcareous substances derived from shells. In this way, energy is not privatized but sustained through transmission and balance.
Sun Yu’s Blue Light series renders a posthuman spiritual landscape through painting. The caves, lakes, and mountain interiors depicted can all be regarded as Esuama—sites that exist materially yet exceed the scope of bodily control. The blue light does not fall directly upon objects; rather, it slowly permeates outward from within them, like eyes suddenly opening in the night before dawn, revealing profound depth and boundlessness. At this moment, the viewer’s gaze loses its former sharpness; the tempo of looking slows, and breathing becomes gentler. As the senses withdraw from immediate stimulation, energy shifts from external expenditure to internal accumulation. Blue light thus becomes a stable and continuous energy field, guiding consciousness inward.
The work Stalker advances this spiritual terrain further, recalling the “Zone” of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film of the same name—a place through which characters move without ever discerning direction or destination. Here, the “Zone” does not signify danger or prohibition, but rather a form of Esuama: a site where energy converges and order circulates. Rules shift at any moment, paths constantly deviate, and the coordinate systems upon which reason depends gradually fail; any intention driven by haste is quietly dismantled. The guide known as the “stalker” is not a possessor of truth, but one who harbors reverence. Through slowness, hesitation, and repetition, inner layers are stripped away, allowing belief and doubt, hope and fear, to confront one another. Sun Yu’s work therefore does not seek to present a world that can be comprehended or occupied. Instead, it functions as a medium: all representations are projections of higher dimensions; all that is visible ultimately leads toward the invisible. The Esuama he presents is not a destination for prolonged dwelling, but a traversable path—one that leads viewers through landscape toward spirit, through light back to the source of energy.
- How to Mourn a Forest
They woodsman forgot them. Night is coming.
I will be one with them. Their mild resins
will flow into my heart. To me they’ll burn like fire.
And—day will find us, silent and clinging
together, in a heap of sorrow.
— (Chile) Gabriela Mistral, Three Trees
Not until the early 1990s did the Kogi end more than a century of isolation, allowing outsiders to enter and periodically document their homeland, daily life, and rituals of environmental protection, in the hope of inspiring similar values in future generations. When a forest is burned, felled, or disappears in silence, the Kogi respond through touch, scent, prayer, and collective chanting, as though keeping vigil for a deceased relative. The death of a forest signifies the loss of a river’s voice, the exile of animals, and the severing of an ancient passage between humanity and the world. More gravely, it signals the decline— the death—of the “Heart of the World.” This compels us to reconsider how sustained restraint and reverence might allow us to remember the lives that must be sacrificed for our prosperity.
Liu Ourui’s work consistently maintains a primordial state of wilderness, with the viewing perspective shifting continuously across the pictorial field: are we hunters lying in wait within the forest, or prey exposed within it? This uncertainty itself constitutes a form of respect for the forest—and for nature at large. The forest does not yield to humanity, nor does it offer a definitive stance; it demands that the body precede judgment, perception precede language. To mourn a forest may begin with relinquishing a commanding gaze and acknowledging that one has long been embedded within it.
Warm Fruits depicts a life field that continues to breathe and grow while remaining perpetually wounded. The green in the painting does not signify specific trees or vegetation, but rather an accumulating life substance that both nourishes forms and gradually consumes them. Its morphology blurs boundaries among human, animal, and plant; it possesses the keen scent and alertness of a predator, alongside the extensibility and rootedness of vegetation, as though it might be reabsorbed into surrounding greenery at any moment. In this hybrid state, soil, vines, and pervasive dampness surge together, entering the body through the nasal passages. Forms resembling fruit, seeds, or skulls appear as organisms not yet fully mature, or as abandoned remnants, suggesting that the forest nurtures new life while silently enduring the consequences of destruction. Liu Ourui’s practice thus resembles an inward transformation: forms dissolve, boundaries gradually vanish, yet an unbroken residue of hope remains. Amid surging color, life continues to unfold.
Embers arrests time in the aftermath of burning, at a stage in which continuation persists. The forest has lost its original form; life activity has been reduced to a minimum. The figures in the painting are blurred and distorted, seemingly shaped from charred remains, heat, and residual energy—resembling both human and a scorched “forest spirit” barely standing. Neither hero nor survivor, it is merely a “vessel”: a human-shaped shelter for the forest after it has lost itself. Disordered brushwork and limb-like fragments attest to an existence that is real yet fragile. Over the long term, Embers does not point to an ending but to a suspended duration: the fire has departed, restoration has not yet arrived. When the forest can no longer sustain wholeness nor retain grandeur, existing only as residual heat, this is precisely the moment that most demands understanding and documentation. It is a sober and unsparing reminder: the death of a forest is not instantaneous. Its pain and breath linger in the air for a long time. The forest’s cry ultimately returns to humanity; only by sharing skin and moisture with the earth can the earth’s “wounds” begin to heal.
Having endured long, viscous stretches of time and crossed innumerable mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas, we have approached—countless times—the place known as the “Heart of the World.” Only when all illusions of arrival and conquest are stripped away, when the insistence on finding an entrance is relinquished, does one sense that it has always resided within the chest. The soil beneath our feet is now faintly warm; deeper still, a subtle yet resolute pulse persists.
