Platform China Contemporary Art Institute (Beijing) presents “Zhuang Hui‘s solo exhibition” on October 25,2014.

Thousand miles from Beijing, near the desert frontier, at the edge of Mongolia, Zhuang Hui has found a vast, empty land with virtually no trace of man “within 50 kilometers”. The land here is a flat expanse covered in gravels. This open filed is the site of Zhuang’s solo exhibition, four of his works are placed on display.

Those artworks have been gingerly set down on the desert floor. The desert doesn’t look like that big, and artworks don’t look small either.” Here, the scale we used to measure space fails. Within this array of artworks, the terrain, the sky, the wind, the light, the shadow, even the cloud, surge forth like waves in succession to those works. Through the trivial time and space, these artworks serve as a bridge, straddling fragmented time and space as if joining banks of a river, linking us together with a truly open expanse. We cannot see with our own eyes the “garden” that these four artworks have shaped out in the desert. But at the intersection of experience and imagination, we can feel that dreamlike existence. Though we are separated by a great physical distance, we don’t have to give up on taking a stroll among them. We can still draw this great open space into our hearts.

There is one more artwork in this exhibition. A thousand kilometers away from the desert, Zhuang Hui has painted two murals in the ruins of an abandoned town. They based on photographs that Zhuang Hui and his friend Lian Dongya took with a local girl, Mou Lili, as they passed through this town in 1990. When he was painting these murals on wall of this abandoned town, old inhabitants who came to reminisce about their old home frequently wandered by.In front of these murals, time begins to gather together. Historical memory and individual experience begin to overlap. Here, we can indulge in imagining days of one’s youth, the rise and fall of a town, the track of a nomad across time and space. Here, an empty city has been granted a new and inexplicable aura.

Platform China Contemporary Art Institute exhibits pictures and video materials about this project, and the real solo exhibition of Zhuang Hui could only be present in a way of absence. However, only within this absence, we can experience the extraordinary blend of time and space in our minds and imagination as much as possible.