Far from Where

Gene Gallery is delighted to announce the group exhibition “Far from Where”, featuring artists Feng Zhixuan, Li Yu and Yi To, on view from March 17 to May 17, 2026.

There is a house in Yao Town. S lives there. At least, that is what people say. It is no different from any other house. If there is any difference, perhaps it lies only in the door, always shut. People pass by, pause, glance in, and move on. No one has said the place is forbidden. No one has really stepped forward to explain anything. Yet over time a rule has settled in: one may linger at the door, talk there, look there—so long as one does not enter. That house seemed always to have stood at that address. The things slowly accreting along the foot of the walls, the window ledges, the tidemarks, the damp and shadowed places, seemed always to have belonged there too. I was almost beginning to doubt it again. But the outline was still there. Still there. There. It is always seen later than I expect, and approached earlier than I expect.

“When I went there, S had already taken the newspaper. He was home. … The mailbox was locked.” I reproached her. How could the displacement of a single object prove the existence of a person? “He’s there. Of course he lives there. His property fees arrive on time every year.” “Have any of you seen him in person? Does he have to come here himself to pay them?” “Not really. The payments are made online.” “Then how can you be sure S exists at all? How can you be sure he is there, and not—” “S is in that house. You question me because you haven’t seen him, and so you think he doesn’t exist. But you haven’t seen him either—how can you be sure he isn’t there? At the very least, in my office, there are contracts he signed, along with receipts and records enough to prove that, from where I stand, he exists. He is in that house.” I cannot drag S out into the open, nor can I erase him by that alone. These are not evidence—at least not the kind that settles anything once and for all. And yet they are not nothing. And yet they do not stop. Entanglement, substitution, default. There they suspend a man no one can clearly speak of, together with the sentence no one can clearly speak, hanging there.

All traces remain separated by a layer: by a brightness that never quite aligns, by a grayness that never quite recedes, by the drift in people’s voices as they speak. They refuse to hand S over, and refuse cleanly to return him either, shifting toward the place he has just risen from—clinging, seeping, briefly occupying it in his stead. No one can say that it is him. No one can say that it is not. Yes, in the end I signed the purchase contract. It is not that I am excessively preoccupied with S. I simply need a long, sustained observation. Water, always flowing— we move against one another along two channels. Water, always converging— and so I feel the urgent need to buy a boat, a boat that is mine alone, so that I may move freely, for a long time, upon the living river, exploring with a lamp lit. Continuing, continuing. Sure enough, I was not the only one who smelled the beef he cooked last night.

Text / Yiwen Tang 2026.3.14