Written by Zhiheng Ashely Zhang

When we imagine a home, we often picture someone tending to it: preparing food, caring for a child, keeping a familiar object in its place. In a culturally familiar image of family life, that someone is a woman. Her presence moves through the room in gestures so ordinary that they can almost disappear from view. These gestures help determine how the space is inhabited. Within them reside both the expectations placed upon her and the possibility of shaping a world according to her own understanding.

At E.SCAPE Art Space in Shanghai, After Throwing happens within a setting that retains the atmosphere of a house. Furniture remains among the artworks, carrying domestic life into the exhibition. Co-curated by Shuhan Zhang and Luman Jiang, with Tutu Zhu as academic advisor, the exhibition brings together eight artists within the annual “[JIA]_Home” project initiated by artistic director Yuanyuan Jin. Here, the household becomes a place of public attention. Its familiar domestic setting invites visitors to connect their own experiences with the exhibition, while the artworks open these surroundings to new meanings.

The title draws on Iris Marion Young’s essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” which takes the act of throwing a ball as a starting point to examine how gendered expectations enter bodily experience, shaping movement, confidence, and the space a person feels able to occupy. The exhibition turns to the moment after the ball leaves the hand, when the gesture is complete but its effects are still unfolding. Its “after” allows uncertainty and repetition. Yet an unfinished movement can still have direction. Through care, memory, and experiments in perception, these artists explore how women might make more space for themselves through different “movements.”

Angela Lyn begins with the body’s power to nourish. In source (2026), cloths used to clean her brushes become a soft, breast-like form holding a small painting of a tree. Materials left over from making art now shelter an image of growth. Lyn connects maternal and artistic creation, giving nurturing a place within her creative practice. In the art of daily doing (2026), a cleaning implement takes on bodily qualities through velvet, elongated forms, and red details. Tending a room becomes a way of giving it order: deciding how it feels, how it functions, and what can flourish within it. Lyn finds dignity in the daily work that allows life to continue.

Yunbo Jia’s bathroom installation Between Lotus And Breast (2025) gives this nourishing body a more troubling presence. Breast-shaped showerheads turn maternal anatomy into a fixture of the room; metal bathing implements unsettle the promise of softness and comfort. Here, nurturing risks becoming something a woman is expected to provide endlessly. Care takes on different meanings across Jia’s and Lyn’s works. It can express a woman’s creative power while also becoming a demand upon her. Both artists ask who determines the terms on which that power is used.

A home also takes shape through what we keep. Objects do more than furnish a room: they give lived experience a place within it. In Lucky Cat (2024), Xiangjie Rebecca Wu remembers her grandmother’s offering table from a child’s height, looking up at objects beyond easy reach. Her paintings preserve the bodily feeling of belonging to a place. The empty Chair (2024) can hold someone’s absence; the Hair Tie (2024) can recall another person’s closeness. These small things make a life felt without showing the person who lived it.

Shengjie Jiang gives such attachments a portable form. Her small paintings respond to repeated moves and the desire to carry meaningful things between homes. In Pot (one bite) (2025), a spoon holding a mouthful of food rests against a muted background, suspending an ordinary moment. Memory offers no complete return: details fade, and later impressions enter the picture. Yuqian He brings a more painful history into this conversation. In Marriage (2023), her account of her mother’s marriage, a wedding dress becomes a bandage for wounds hidden beneath domestic happiness. Across these works, remembering includes affection, revision, and the need to let go. What deserves to be kept is also a question of whose experience deserves attention. Displayed in an exhibition, these private histories become part of a shared world.

Other works ask what happens when familiar ways of encountering that world are interrupted. Joy Li’s three-channel video Intermission (2024) records a five-hour performance in which she gives up speech and upright walking. White contact lenses restrict her sight, facial antennae help her sense nearby objects, and colored lights guide her toward food, water, and a blanket. By setting limits on familiar abilities, Li must find another way through her surroundings. The work makes perception feel changeable: a body can learn a different relationship with the space around it.

Sherly Fan turns toward the expectations that govern how a person should appear. In CAN YOU TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY (2023), the persona “Sherly” uses childhood narratives and nostalgic cuteness to express vulnerability and difficult emotions. Sweetness draws the viewer closer, then becomes uneasy. The title asks whether an experience must look mature or composed to deserve attention. Fan makes room for feelings that do not arrive in an approved form.

Yibei Zhang’s Murmurs of Water and Warblings of Birds (2026) carries this questioning into the relationship between bodies and their environments. Marble and cast aluminum make familiar organic and everyday forms strange. Her inquiry into natural processes and technological networks extends beyond the household toward forces that shape life without always being visible. The connection to gender is less direct here, but this shift also broadens what the exhibition allows women’s experience to encompass. The world outside the home, with its ecological pressures and technological changes, is equally a field for their attention and imagination.

Taken together, these experiments give the act of making space different dimensions: trying another movement, asking for recognition, or noticing a relationship previously overlooked. They offer no assurance of progress. Their differences matter as no single perspective can account for all the forces that shape a life. Through their willingness to work with unfamiliar positions, the artists make other possibilities of participation imaginable. E.SCAPE’s public yet intimate setting allows bodily sustenance and personal memory to remain present as the works reach toward wider social and environmental relationships. Maternal power, intimate memories, and unfamiliar ways of seeing enter a conversation about how a world is shaped and who has room within it.

After the ball leaves the hand, the body still stands somewhere. The habits surrounding it do not disappear, but the gesture has tested its reach. After Throwing is most persuasive when it holds this possibility close to ordinary life. A home is made through gestures repeated over time; its meanings can change through them too. The house remains, while the women within it begin to claim more room for lives of their own, and perhaps to reach further still.

About Writer

Zhiheng Ashely Zhang is an art historian, independent curator, and bilingual writer working between New York and Beijing. Currently a PhD candidate at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), she holds master’s degrees from New York University and the University of Barcelona. Her writing and curatorial practices focus on contemporary art, visual culture, and interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue. Her critical perspective is shaped by her interdisciplinary academic research and international curatorial experience across the United States, China, and Japan.

(Image courtesy of E.SCAPE and the artist)