THUS COME
THUS GONE
Curator/Text : Yang Wang
Compassion, within Buddhist philosophy, is understood not as a mere emotional response but as a mode of wisdom,
a discerning way of perceiving and being.
Yet this invites us to ask: what, in fact, is the object of compassion? As Buddhist thought resists definitive formulations,
this exhibition takes a parallel stance:
rather than offering an answer, it approaches the question obliquely by posing another:
What remains in the presence of absence?
The exhibition seeks to compose a relational field that neither stages “absence” as an object nor claims that “something comes and goes.” Instead, it articulates conditions under which the presence of absence becomes perceptible,
as a threshold opened by the refusal to fix things as self-standing essences. Within this field, compassion emerges as attention-in-practice: a disciplined, gentle way of noticing without grasping.
To curate under this logic is to practice what might be called
a second-order composition—
a curatorial act that composes relations among relations.
Rather than adding meaning to works, the exhibition arranges them in proximities that allow their internal logics to resonate.
Adjacency replaces assertion; echo replaces explanation.
We keep thresholds intact: gaps, silences, and unfinishedness are not deficits to be sutured by wall text,
but the very hinges on which presence turns.
Within such a field, attention takes on an ethical tone. Compassion, therefore, is no longer a vague sentiment,
but a trained manner of attending—
steady, non-grasping, willing to let things be as they do their work.
In Buddhist terms, this is where non-clinging opens onto prajñā, discerning intelligence; in Western idioms, it resonates with Adorno’s insistence on non-identity, Levinas’s call to face an irreducible Other, and Derrida’s ethics of hospitality—the capacity to welcome what arrives without reducing it to the same. The visitor does not leave with answers so much as with a capacity, for clear seeing and wise response
that can travel back into daily life.
“Thus come, thus gone.”
The phrase names two faces of a single movement.
Forms arrive as instruction and recede as instruction;
what remains is not a relic but a way of standing with things. If the exhibition succeeds, it is not because it proves a thesis but because it allows a question to ripen in experience:
What becomes present when possession loosens,
when essence is not imposed,
when we allow absence to do its quiet work?
In that loosening, attention gathers itself
and in attention, compassion appears.
Notes
The curatorial stance employs the lens of Buddhist philosophy as method, not as doctrine.
Śūnyatā—often rendered as “emptiness”—
is understood here as the refusal to reify,
the decision not to fix a thing as possessing a self-standing essence (niḥsvabhāva). When the reflex to posit a core withdraws, a small clearing opens. What appears in that clearing is not a metaphysical void but a living space of relation, where material, temporal, and social forces can do their quiet work.
The exhibition’s “absence,” then, names this clearing:
a deliberate non-possession that allows phenomena to arrive and depart without being forced into the shape of a claim.
This leads directly to pratītyasamutpāda, dependent arising: appearances depend on causes and conditions and therefore lack intrinsic being.
A moment of presence never belongs to a single work; it arises as a temporary configuration of
co-factors.
We do not insist that relations produce existence; rather, we allow the conditionality of appearing to be felt. To stand within such a configuration is to sense how fragile and precise presence is—
and how easily it tips back into withdrawal.
Tathatā (thusness) does not signify an empiricist “things just as they are.”
In the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition, tathatā points toward the dhar- makāya—a “suchness without form”—while the forms we encounter belong to nirmāṇakāya: appearances that teach, forms that serve without being the last word.
The exhibition works within this pedagogy of the visible. It uses forms without clinging to them:
what is shown is allowed to show, and then to step aside. Meaning is not extracted and stored as doctrine;
it is traced, and then released.
Picture Credit: Jier JIAN & Editions Alaya
Apocallapse | Jier JIANG
JIANG Jier’s ongoing Apocallapse’s diary series construct a speculative landscape in which human civilization collapses and the continuity of time disintegrates.
This imagined end of history parallels, on a conceptual level, certain ideas articulated in Buddhist thought—particularly those concerning impermanence (anicca) and the pervasiveness of suffering (dukkha).
The works do not seek to represent Buddhist doctrine, but rather uss its vocabulary as a lens through which the instability of human order can be examined.
In this sense, Apocallapse transforms the cosmic “end” into a study of how images of decline expose the fragility of systems that claim permanence.
Across the Diary series, temporal imagery recurs with deliberate insistence.
In Diary 02, “time stands still,” and the burnt shell of a clock collapses into a tombstone.
In Diary 03, an ancient pendulum is inserted into an electronic screen in an attempt to restore temporal rhythm, yet the mechanism fails and remains motionless.
Through these depictions of temporal arrest, Jiang externalizes the tension between technological mastery and existential transience.
Time, presented as a measurable resource, is revealed instead as an unstable construct—a field continually interrupted by entropy and loss. The halting of time becomes an aesthetic condition through which impermanence is rendered visible, rather than a metaphysical claim about the nature of being.
The work’s imagery of ruin—tombs replacing vitrines, fragments of language scattered across the ground, technological remnants lying inert—produces an atmosphere of exhaustion that speaks to the collapse of meaning itself.
What emerges is not moral warning but a phenomenology of decay: the viewer encounters a world in which progress and ruin are inseparable.
In this, Apocallapse reflects the first truth of suffering only insofar as it describes the consequences of attachment—the human desire to stabilize what is inherently unstable.
Jiang also stages the limits of knowledge through motifs of “failed archaeology” and “damaged memory.”
In Diary 01, archaeologists refuse to recognize seven ancient Sanxingdui symbols as a legitimate language, rendering a previous civilization’s record permanently unreadable.
This act of denial, whether historical or symbolic, marks the threshold where comprehension fails.
Rather than condemning ignorance, the work frames unknowing as an inevitable condition of interpretation: every system of understanding produces its own opacity.
The “black hole” that absorbs meaning thus becomes a metaphor for both the loss of knowledge and the impossibility of total understanding.
Jiang’s works do not depict absence as negation but allows absence to define the boundaries of perception.
Their ruins and temporal fissures invite the viewer to inhabit the interval between comprehension and uncertainty—a space resonant to the exhibition’s notion of attention-in-practice.
To observe these remnants without seeking closure is itself an ethical stance: one that treats disappearance as part of appearance, and the end of civilization as a site where perception learns to remain still.
Project No.2 | Zhongyang LIU
Liu Zhongyang’s Project No.2 begins in a moment of creative crisis and a direct question: Why am I making images?
The inquiry is answered not by theory but through the act of making itself—making-as-inquiry. Rejecting the camera, Liu works directly on unexposed Kodak Tri-X film, using a transparent leader as line.
An afternoon of touch, tension, and
time is inscribed into the film’s emulsion: a quiet choreography where presence registers without representation.
This gesture opposes the habit of treating images as evidence of existence. The film carries a trace of having-been without offering optical proof. Presence, here, is tactile rather than visual; existence leaves a residue but not a picture. The artist’s process—drawing, scratching, and sensing the film in real time—translates the experience of being into an event of contact. What remains is neither documentation nor abstraction, but an index of relation: an image that does not show but reminds.
In the artist’s own words:
“I spent an afternoon fishing with transparent line, embedding my presence into the material. This act embodies existence itself— having been is simply having been, difficult to prove yet undeniably real.”
The work acknowledges that the unknown vastly exceeds the known; to create is not to master the visible, but to dwell in the space of not-knowing.
From here, Liu turns the private question outward to the viewer: Why are you watching this?
Meaning arises not from answers, but from the courage to question. His film neither offers closure nor demands belief; it invites a form of seeing that is steady, patient, and non-possessive.
Picture Credit: Editions Alaya & Zhongyang LIU
