WHEN A FEATHER MEETS AMBER: Tobias Thaens & Xu Yihua

BROWNIE Project Gallery is honored to announce the upcoming duo exhibition "When a Feather Meets Amber" by artists Tobias Thaens and Xu Yihua. This exhibition is curated by Zhu Lin and will open on Saturday 14 March, 2026.

“When avian influenza swept through colonies of northern gannets, claiming them in great numbers, scientists arrived to find something unforeseen: in some of the birds that survived, the pale blue of their irises had deepened to black. Investigation confirmed that these gannets, marked by this change, carried resistance to the plague. Elsewhere, there are pearlfish—slender and translucent—that slip between the valves of bivalves to hide from hunters, yet often meet their end within those calcified walls, leaving nothing behind but a ghostly imprint of their form upon the inner shell. And creatures trapped in the slow amber of tree resin do not become fossils; in one piece of amber holding the fragment of a dinosaur's tail, the cells themselves are preserved, impossibly intact. These three fragments of natural history became the germ of Tobias Thaens's newest works. In each, there is a suspension, and a change that arrives in an instant. The suspension is both terminus and genesis; the change, though fleeting, engraves itself permanently, casting long shadows into the future. What we take as certain—can it ever truly be certain?

In Xu Yihua's work, these intangible moments also dwell. Her materials and forms differ, yet she, too, places change and flow at the heart of her expression. What we see, what we think we know—none of it is fixed. None of it may even be true. Everything flows. Change can be foreseen, yet it always exceeds what we thought we understood. If for Thaens nature is a feather caught in amber, the shimmer of camouflage, the iridescent wings of an orchid bee, the low passage of a storm petrel—then for Xu Yihua, nature is the dapple of light and shadow, the wind's passage through grass, the air that wraps us, the visible and invisible architectures of the space around us. ”  

—— Zhu Lin