The goal of this exhibition is to create a contemplative space where art serves as a refuge from collective despair. The exhibition features 31 works by 8 artists from China, Israel, Peru, Iran, France, and Singapore, spanning a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, video, and mixed media.
Each artwork in the exhibition primarily utilizes natural materials, from minerals, dust, soil to ice and fossils. The artists juxtapose the slow, 4.6-billion-year geological transformation with the rapid and often chaotic changes in technology, society, and politics. The echoes of "deep time" may offer solace to our fatigue and sense of loss in today's world.
Israeli artist Ella Littwitz reflects on universal questions about human nature and our relationship with the environment and nationalism. Who owns the soil? Where are the boundaries of free migration for both people and land? With these questions in mind, she spent three years, with the help of friends and strangers, creating The Unknown Land of the South. This sculpture is made from soil collected in 19 countries that Israeli citizens are permanently forbidden from visiting, forming an imagined territory—an alternative utopia.
Peruvian-born Belgian artist Nicolas Lamas juxtaposes natural elements like fossils, coral, and clay with industrial objects such as books, machines, and circuit boards, generating new associations and meanings that imagine a possible future. In his series Letters to the Future, he created four cuneiform clay tablets. However, instead of the traditional reed stylus marks, these tablets bear the imprints of discarded circuit boards. Through this letter written in the "new language" of contemporary world, Lamas reminds us that we are merely one link in the vast evolutionary chain— our rapid progress underscores our fragility and may lead to an even swifter extinction.
Similarly, Iranian artist Shahpour Pouyan turns our focus to the depths of history. Adept in painting, sculpting, and ceramics, his work often invites audiences to delve into themes of history and reflect on power dynamics. In early civilizations, clay was used to build the first huts, which evolved into settlements and then cities— in a sense, the "first brick" was the foundation of today’s societal structures. In the same light, Pouyan crafted seven architectural clay sculptures, and collectors are invited to commission new additions, allowing the works to grow and evolve over time.
The resonance of clay and civilization is also evident in Messa in Luce by the Chinese artist duo Alchemyverse, based in New York. Describing themselves as "travellers of deep time," they were invited in 2022 to participate in a residency in the Atacama Desert, the driest place in the world, located in northern Chile. During their time there, they collected wild clay from the Río San Pedro and used traditional indigenous firing pits to create fourteen clay pieces. These sculptures are exhibited with sound recorded during their field trip. Their work pays homage to the indigenous long traditions of living in harmony with nature and invites us to hear the subtle yet profound sound of deep time.
French artist Hugo Deverchère explores the intersection of art, nature, and science, offering a way of observing that transcends the limitations of human perception. His two sets of work present at the same time the vast and the microscopic, the distant and the near. Field examines the Martian landscape through the lens of a reconnaissance orbiter, while also incorporating the micro view of Earth's soil. Exotime employs transmission electron microscopy to magnify the internal structure of minerals by a million times. As the artist explains, "The strata are sculptures co-created by various materials, biological and human forces. New way of looking at the landscape has the potential to radically change our thinking and how we understand our place within the universe and nature.”
For Beijing-based artist Guo Hongwei, observing geological and mineral landscapes is like watching a film crafted by the universe. In textures of rocks, we sometimes see human figures or landscapes, while at other times we become absorbed in abstract patterns. Using mineral pigments, Guo recreates these "geological films" on canvas. The pigments themselves not only created an imaginative space for both the artist and viewer but also reflect nature’s remarkable beauty through their materiality.
For over ten years, Shanghai-based artist Ni Youyu has been widely recognized for his series on "dust." Using a 19th-century prints of spiral nebulae as a blueprint, he employs traditional cartographic methods—precise measurements and grid systems—to recreate the nebula image with chalk dust on a blackboard. At any given moment, the chalk dust is imperceptibly detaching and settling, slowly altering the seemingly stable image of the nebula, just as the real universe evolves with every passing second.
Dust is far from the only material featured in the artworks of this exhibition. Singaporean artist Dawn Ng uses ice, pigments, and air to capture and document the passage of time. She spends months meticulously layering and freezing various pigments, including acrylic, watercolor, and ink, transforming liquid into solid sculptures. The entire process of the sculpture's melting and evaporation is recorded over the course of several days. In her new work Flow Sweetly, Hang Heavy II, Ng explores how natural forces shape landscapes like mountains and valleys. By simulating environmental conditions with fans and heat lamps, she controls the melting speed and direction of the ice, ultimately creating a "microcosm" on the canvas.
The word "Dust" in the exhibition title refers to the basic components of all matter, while "Children of Dust" draws from a well-known theory that nearly all the elements in the human body were forged in stars. In other words, you, me, people of different races and cultures, the land beneath our feet, the mountains outside the window, and the dust, soil, stones, ice, and metal used in the artworks are all fragments of a vast cosmic past. We are all children of dust.
The exhibition opens on October 25, 2024, and will run until February 8, 2025. During this period, Mayao Art Space will host various online and offline events in collaboration with curator Dr Penny Dan Xu and assistant curator Jiawen Li. Interviews with each artist will also be published to provide in-depth insights into the artists’ practices. Stay tuned!
