DOPPELGANGER

ZHAOCHEN CHEN

DEBORAH WILKINSONN

12 July- 26 July

Two-Person Dialogue Exhibition:

DOPPELGANGER

Curator：Marcus XU

This exhibition invites the audience into an intimate space between reality and dreamscape through a delicately emotional, multi-media language rooted in a post-feminist sensibility. The artists transcend everyday experiences and private objects, transforming fragmented perceptions into a luminous flow that touches the depths of the viewer’s soul. It is a poetic journey—one that unfolds a multi-dimensional space encompassing female experience, emotional subjectivity, and the poetics of media.

The journey begins with Wilkinson’s female-centered picture books, where fragments of life, domestic imagery, and diary-like illustrations intertwine on paper. Her whimsical strokes often intersect with the diverse emotional responses of the audience, presenting a hypersensory exploration of the authentic self. Teacups, fallen leaves, and passersby—visual motifs in her books—float softly like silk through the overlapping realms of reality and perception, serving as vessels and sites of feminine memory.

In contrast, Zhaochen CHEN’s video works adopt a more constructed sensual framework. Through densely layered visual narratives, she evokes an experience akin to haptic visuality, where seeing is no longer mere observation but an embodied sensory engagement. Her portrayal of temporal fractures and spatial ambiguities becomes a “poetic corporeal archive” that rejects linear logic and closed narratives, instead weaving a visual genealogy of feminine existence through delay and provocation.

The interplay between paperwork and video within the exhibition space creates a sensory network rooted in a “first-person perspective,” positioning every viewer as a potential accomplice and co-creator of the artworks. Viewers are no longer distant observers but become emotional doppelgängers—extensions of the artists’ affective systems. The curator, drawing from theories of intimacy and Freudian philosophy, captures the universal tensions contemporary individuals face between desire, emotion, and identity.

What unfolds is a “post-narrative affective topology”—a structure that avoids complete portraiture, instead using fragmentation, intimacy, and recursive visual cues to craft a cultural thread that spans generations and bodies. These restrained, deeply personal emotions are distilled by the curator into an emotional light stream that transcends nationality, age, and culture. This metaphor resonates with Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, where dreamy fragments serve not only as an aesthetic foundation of Eastern poetics but also as an intimately connected historical thread within Western cultural frameworks.

Through the depiction of overlapping temporalities and “photosensitive diaries,” the exhibition disassembles and reassembles moments of interconnected desires. The audience, projecting their own emotions into the artists’ distinct mediums, encounters an intimate, cinematic experience imbued with an ineffable emotional warmth. The persistent red tone—both classical and modern—echoes subtle desires throughout. Ultimately, the exhibition reads as a ritual with historical depth, where sublimity and intimacy converse, revealing the fluidity and complexity of individual identity in contemporary society.

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