A disquieting sense of instability descends the moment one encounters the works of Catalina Milea and Li Jun. Familiar scenes and everyday elements—under the artists’ orchestration unfold into a multitude of unsettling possibilities. Yet these possibilities do not linger. At first glance, they collapse into an initial impression, only to resurface gradually as the viewer’s imagination begins to drift and deepen.

The concept of “collapse,” borrowed from quantum physics, lies at the heart of this exhibition. In quantum theory, every moment before its occurrence exists in a superposition—a state of multiple coexisting possibilities—until an observation or external force causes it to collapse into a single, definitive outcome. The works of Milea and Li, while rooted in scenes from real life, evoke fleeting personal memories—moments one might feel they’ve lived. Yet upon close comparison, these inner recollections never truly coincide with the images before us. Their intent is never to replicate reality, but rather to create some that transcend, distort, or strip away the expected and the orderly—like the apophenia (Klaus Conrad, 1958) or the simulacra (Jean Baudrillard , 1981).These constructs become the very source of each work’s intrinsic instability and expansive potential; in other words, Milea’s and Li Jun’s motives make the work itself a suggestion of a “superposition state”. 

This explains the strange undercurrent so effortlessly present within each frame. Every potential state within a superposition is formed by elements that, while drawn from the everyday, have been transcended, distorted, or dislodged from reason and order. The works resurrect fragments of reality that are often hidden or forgotten, concentrating them into a sudden detonation of the familiar. They shake our sense of normalcy, evoking what Freud termed the uncanny (das Unheimliche, 1919)—a feeling both intimate and estranged, both known and disquieting. 

As these feelings unfold, the work’s quantum system collapses with the viewer’s first impression— simultaneously giving rise to another system, one that hinges on personal memory, association, and imagination. We hear how Milea, guided by a private holographic logic, communes with sacred forces of nature, losing herself in a beauty that is seen but never seized. We see how Li, through quiet elegance, unveils the latent violences enacted by structures of gender and culture—her unease transfigured into aesthetic poetics, a way of negotiating with the world. Yet when exposed under the viewer’s gaze, these gestures also appear to mock, with subtle defiance, the very systems of power they unveil. 

Within this new wave, every particle collides, every possible state intersects, giving rise to new permutations. The quantum state becomes the most fitting metaphor: elusive, diffuse, unbound. The human allure of uncertainty—primal and unshakable—takes center stage. Even as it arrives cloaked in fear and ambiguity, we cannot help but long for its hidden face: infinite possibility, eternal chance, and undying hope. 

And it is this collision of simultaneous thought—at once unstable and ecstatic—that propels us into the peak of the moment. Such exquisite unreality does not fade. We remain here, in the pause, until the next collapse. 

Written by Huo Yanru

Venue
Gene Gallery, NO.4221, Longwu Road, Minhang District, Shanghai, China

Artist
Catalina Milea, Li Jun

Curator
Huo Yanru

Exhibition Dates
June 8 – July 20, 2025

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Sunday | 11 AM – 7 PM

Website
https://gene-gallery.com

Instagram
@gene_gallery

Contact
shanghai@gene-gallery.com

About Artist

CATALINA MILEA

Instagram: catalina_milea

Catalina Milea (b. 04.08.2000 in Bistrita, Romania) now works and lives between Cluj-Napoca, Romania and Paris, France. In 2024 and 2022, Catalina respectively received the degree of Master and Bachelor from University of Arts and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Faculty of Fine Arts – Painting. In 2022, she received the scholarship at Accademia di Belle Artidi Venezia. Selected Solo Exhibitions: Pause for Collapses, Gene Gallery, Shanghai (2025); My Eyes see without Looking, Galerie Kokanas, Marseille (2023); A Gathering of the Invisible, IOMO Gallery, Bucharest (2023);

Selected Group Exhibitions: Primitive Logistics, Matca Gallery, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2025);

Whatever is new about this show is not yet visible, Zina Gallery, Cluj-Napoca (2025); Show Off 6, Matca Gallery, Cluj-Napoca (2024); Le Cas erotique, Galerie Kokanas, Marseille (2024); ASPHALT, Gene Gallery, Shanghai (2024); Hacking the Future, Matca Gallery, Cluj-Napoca (2023); AFTERLIFE. A New Beginning, Boccanera Gallery, Trento (2022); “There is no concept, only my intuition”, Cosmic House Gallery, Cluj-Napoca (2022); Eggwhite, Cosmic House Gallery, Cluj-Napoca (2022); Travel Guide, IOMO Gallery in Bucharest (2021); Simple Things, ArtWise Gallery, Saròspatak (2021); Opening Event, Cosmic House Gallery, Cluj-Napoca (2021);

LI JUN

Instagram: juuunli_ 

Li Jun was born in 1994 in Changsha, China; she now lives and works in Vienna. Since 2022, she has been studying in Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, class of Prof. Daniel Richter. In 2016, Li Jun received Bachelor of Arts from China Academy of Art. In 2024, she received Grant from The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. 

Selected Solo Exhibitions: Pause for Collapses, Gene Gallery, Shanghai (2025); Heterotopia/遊園驚夢, ZÉRUÌ, London (2025); The Case of a Strange Woman, Turn Gallery, New York (2024); Teeth and Script, Art Lab Center, Beijing (2022); Curiosity Cabinet, Turn Gallery, New York (2021);

Selected Group Exhibitions: Beings Out of Place, Petitree, Shenzhen (2025); In the Still of the Night, Exhibit Studio, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna (2024); These Boots Are Made For Walkin, Room 57 gallery, New York (2024); Ziffer im PDF, Gallery Krinzinger Schottenfeld, Vienna (2024); Reverie Reset, Gallery the Tigerroom, Munich (2024); HUMDRUM, CCA Andratx, Andratx Mallorca, Spain (2023); DETOUR, Gallery Func, Shanghai (2023); Prelude to the Backflow, BONIAN Space, Beijing (2023); Among Flowers, Turn Gallery, New York (2022); Beautiful Home, Powerlong Museum, Shanghai (2021); Shanghai Youth Art Exhibition, Shanghai (2019); Animation Art Biennial, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2018); Shanghai Festival “Daytime Dreamers”, Shanghai Theatre Academy, Shanghai (2016); MEMECITY Multimedia Art Festival, Art Museum of China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (2015);

About Curator

HUO YANRU

Instagram: yanrurue

Huo Yanru, as curator, writer, and author, currently works and lives in Shanghai. Her personal

research and practice focus on the genealogy of contemporary art history, the interactive relationship between the materiality and spiritual orientation of materials under the influence of changes in power structures, and the transformation of human emotions.

(Text and images courtesy of Gene Gallery)

ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI is honoured to announce the group exhibition Beyond The Circular Ruins, showcasing works by artists aaajiao (b. 1984, China), NOH Sangho (b. 1986, Korea), RAO Weiyi (b. 1993, China), TAN Mu (b. 1991, China), and WU Ziyang (b. 1990, China), on view from May 23 (Fri) to July 19 (Sat), 2025. The exhibition explores fissures in algorithmic systems and generative technologies, presenting aesthetic and conceptual experiments born from artists’ embrace of “non-mastery” amid conflicts between machinic logic and human intention, manifested through glitches, voids, aberrations, and discontinuities.

Exhibition Theme
“For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. […] They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.”

This closing passage from Jorge Luis Borges’ The Circular Ruins (Las Ruinas Circulares) unveils a recursive Samsara of creation: a sorcerer from the wilderness conjures another human’s flesh and consciousness through dreams, after experiencing ruptures of dream, delirium, and awakening, until finally igniting illusion life with fire. Yet when the newly born youth departs for the next crumbling sanctuary, the sorcerer’s own burned sanctuary is consumed once more—the creator, too, is an illusion dreamed by another.

This technological parable persists in our “eternal present”: AI generates “intelligence” through layered data and backpropagation-based iterative training, its stacked architectures entrenched in path-dependent technical paradigms. The black-box nature of deep learning (with its inherent lack of explainability) renders retroactive tracing and correction mechanisms nearly inoperative, ultimately breeding simulacra of technological autonomy. Yet the power relations within technological systems—such as the data politics of algorithmic bias—also overflow human intentionality through opacity, particularly in the liminal zones of systemic turbulence: boundaries between binary oppositions like human/machine, logic/emotion, input/output, and intentionality/automation dissolve here.  The glitch here is not an error but a declaration: critical reflection emerges at these fissures when the system transiently exposes its inherent biases, its opacity, or its discrepancies from human cognition.

Rather than striving for mastery over AI, these artists embrace non-mastery, allowing for slippages, unpredictability, and co-authored emergence, seeking possibilities beyond predetermined cycles. Their practices foreground not resolution, but ambiguity; not fluency, but friction. Beyond The Circular Ruins thus proposes the seam not as a site of closure or division, but as a space of radical potential—a zone where perception is refracted, art critically entangles with technology, and birthplaces of new possibilities.

Venue
ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI, 2F-205, 30 Wen’an Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai, China 200085

Artist
aaajiao, NOH Sangho, RAO Weiyi, TAN Mu, WU Ziyang

Exhibition Dates
May 23 – July 19, 2025

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday | 11 AM – 6 PM

Website
https://www.arariogallery.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/arariogallery_official/

Contact
sojung.kang@arariogallery.com

(Text and images courtesy of ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI)

ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI is pleased to announce the opening of the inaugural exhibition at its new Shanghai space, titled Fluid in Forms, running from March 19 (Wed) to May 11 (Sun), 2025. Curated by LIANG Qing, this group exhibition will feature works by artists KIM Byoungho (b. 1974, Korea), KIM Inbai (b. 1978, Korea), LEE Jeongbae (b. 1974, Korea), LEE Seung Ae (b. 1979, Korea), LIM Nosik (b. 1989, Korea), CHEN Yufan (b. 1973, China), CHEN Yujun (b. 1976, China), HU Yun (b. 1986, China), Pocono ZHAO Yu (b. 1990, China), and Kohei YAMADA (b. 1997, Japan). This exhibition explores the diverse interpretations of everyday elements and the individual expressive approaches to the fluidity of reality as reflected in the practices of the 10 participating artists spanning a generation. Through this, it seeks to shed light on how East Asian visual traditions continue to evolve and transform within today’s global context. 

In the realm of the intangible, all things remain in flux. The notion of “Fluid in Forms (虛实相)” signifies a dynamic presence—a continuous state of becoming—that nurtures infinite possibilities amid the dissolution of boundaries. The concept of Xu (虛, the intangible) and Shi (实, the substantial) embodies a transformation in which being and non-being give rise to one another, forming impressions and perceptions that remain elusive and difficult to define. The distinction between Xu (虛) and Shi (实) in tangible objects is shaped entirely by the perceiving subject, with its clarity dynamically reflecting one’s relationship with the surrounding environment. The resulting “Fluid in Forms (虛实相)”—where Xiàng (相) exists within Xu Shi (虚实), or the Shi Xiàng (实相) of Xu (虚)—is no longer merely the external manifestation of objects but rather a subjective image, delineated and constructed by human consciousness.

The disjunction between objective image and subjective imagery creates the reality of the intangible, which, owing to its ambiguous and hazy boundaries, possesses an imagination far exceeding that of the substantial. In the East Asian tradition of expression, clear and distinct boundaries are typically avoided in favour of absence, emptiness, void, or indeterminacy, yet present more of the unseen. The vagueness of form curtails the fixation on rigid, concrete entities, liberating the meaning of objects from their inherent physical constraints. Their meanings are no longer confined to an inherent physicality but can wander and transition across time and field, opening up broader possibilities.

Opening Reception
March 19, 2025 | 3 – 7 PM

Address
ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI, 2F-205, 30 Wen’an Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai, China 200085

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday ｜11 AM – 6 PM

Artist
KIM Byoungho, KIM Inbai, LEE Jeongbae, LEE Seung Ae, LIM Nosik, CHEN Yufan, CHEN Yujun, HU Yun, Pocono ZHAO Yu, Kohei YAMADA

Curator
LIANG Qing

Exhibition Dates
March 19 – May 11, 2025

Website
https://www.arariogallery.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/arariogallery_official/

Contact
sojung.kang@arariogallery.com
+82-10-9256-1491

About Artists

The 10 artists presented in this exhibition share the homogeneous yet distinctly diverse traditions of the East Asian cultural sphere while simultaneously experiencing varying degrees of modernity’s impact. Their works are largely connected to nature, yet the images they evoke are not entirely clear-cut representations. Instead, tangible entities are absorbed into the flow of time, continuously oscillating between appearance and withdrawal. Korean artist KIM Inbai (b. 1978, Korea) explores the invisible as a catalyst for expanding perception by simulating or observing phenomena that do not exist in visual reality. He translates the body into points, lines, and planes within space or paints it as vast and imbued with the atmosphere of traditional East Asian landscape paintings. LIM Nosik (b. 1989, Korea) similarly focuses on landscapes in his recent works and continuously explores intangible forces. Through a mode of reciprocal self-forgetfulness in observation, he depicts air and transparent atmospheres.

Chinese artists CHEN Yufan (b. 1973, China) and CHEN Yujun (b. 1976, China) draw upon memories of their hometown and their experiences of prolonged migration. Their distinct personalities yield markedly different artistic styles: the former articulates his experiences and reflections on individual existence, repetitive labour, and social order using a calm, abstract language, whereas the latter constructs scenes where memory and reality interweave in a passionate and integrative manner, thereby seeking answers regarding self-redemption and the direction of human nomadic life towards a distant future. 

Korean artist LEE Jeongbae (b. 1974, Korea) captures fragments of mountains, rivers, and the sky within urban landscapes. Using geometric divisions and industrial materials such as FRP and aluminium panels, he reconstructs nature – torn apart by capitalism and materialism – into unique abstract landscapes. Similarly engaged with the urban landscape, Japanese artist Kohei YAMADA (b. 1997, Japan) expresses a distinctive sense of chromatic depth, density and contemplation through layered geometric fields of colour. By superimposing different colour fields, he reveals ‘boundaries’ as connecting and intermediate spaces.

Another subtle thread woven through the exhibition is the artists’ displacement and deduction of objects’ semantics. By dissociating and dislocating objects from their original meanings, they activate novel interpretations within contemporary contexts, wherein “meaning transcends mere material form.” In the works of Korean artist LEE Seung Ae (b. 1979, Korea), plant images conceal intangible elements such as emotion and faith, while invisible forces—energy, sentiment, light, and sound—permeate the space between the inner and outer worlds. KIM Byongho (b. 1974, Korea) likens his sculptures to artificially cultivated “gardens,” employing precise mechanical replication and paradoxical critique to expose the tensions and contradictions between the individual and the collective, homogeneity and difference, within a modern civilization built on rationalism. 

Chinese artist HU Yun (b. 1986, China) traces, collects, and re-edits historical fragments to explore the boundaries between reality and transcendence, materiality and spirituality, visibility and invisibility. The plant images in his work similarly acquire richer and more diverse semantics through the deep cultural context that underpins it. Pocono ZHAO Yu (b. 1990, China), on the other hand, seeks to transform a “self-culture” perspective into one of “other cultures.” Drawing from walking and personal experience, she employs elements from semiotics, literature, and related social sciences to deconstruct scenes, thereby revealing the global flows of civilization and cultural transformation. In her works, new narrators emerge as “intruders” who interrogate historical truth and explore the intricate interplay between originals and replicas.

In the realm of the intangible, all things remain in flux. The notion of “fluid in forms” signifies a dynamic presence, a continuous state of becoming—that nurtures infinite possibilities amid the chaos of dissolving boundaries. As the Suzhou Creek flows forward, ARARIO GALLERY inaugurates a new chapter in Shanghai.

(Text and images courtesy of ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI)