The Restless Flesh

Levant Art, together with curators Lin Ye and Yuan Jing, invites ten artists — Cui Yu, Cao Zaifei, He Chi, Hu Jiayi, Jiang Hanxuan, Li Aixiao, Liu Shuwei, Qian Lili, Song Xi, and Yao Cong — in presenting this group exhibition ‘The Restless Flesh’.

In this day and age, we possess an unprecedented array of means to exert control over the body, yet this has only pushed the body further into the role of mere packaging of the actual value, without necessarily bringing us any closer to understanding the mind-body relationship from the body's own standpoint, or to understanding life as a unity of flesh and spirit.

The reason that causes the flesh to be restless is that spirit and body have never truly been apart. This primordial state does not alter by any ideological imposition. Perhaps what we need is to attempt a new mode of thinking — the body as spirit, or the spirit as body — in order to understand life, to understand the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, and that between the human being and the world. Art, as a spiritual act of the body (or equally, a bodily act of the spirit), offers an ideal arena for such exploration.

In this exhibition, ten artists draw from their own embodied experiences, transform the inner tension between body and society, through diverse mediums, into a new system of expression. Through this, they seek to reimagine the body's relationship to society and the material world, and to rediscover the body's possibilities alongside the complex entanglement of mind and flesh.