Matèria is pleased to announce the opening of Spoken Leaves, Chen Xiaoyi's second solo exhibition at the gallery. With her long-awaited return to Rome, the artist presents a new body of work that highlights her pronounced inclination towards multidisciplinarity developed in recent years, evidenced by the fusion of photography, publishing, sculpture, video, and experimental printing techniques.
The title Spoken Leaves draws inspiration from a dialogue between Martin Heidegger and Tezuka Tomio (a professor of German literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo), in which the two, to explore the subtle evocative nuances of language and its essence, delve into the concept of “Koto ba,” a Japanese term meaning “word/ language” but also known as the “Garden of Words.” This definition, with its deep metaphorical character, plays a key role in Chen’s research, inviting viewers to navigate existential dimensions beyond mere verbal communication.
在陈萧伊的实践中，风景沿着有限性与超越的坐标重新绘制，在充满动能的视角中，以超越人类时间性的界限，寻求一种潜在生命力和存在的可能性，这种观点挑战了我们对存在和非存在的传统理解；同时在充满困境和不确定性的当代景观中，成为一种新的导航。
Spoken Leaves thus emerges as a bridge, fluidly connecting the ordinary with the profound traces of nature and human consciousness; a metaphorical boundar formally rendered by the monumentality of the Hengduan Mountains in China, a place that has characterized the artist’s last four years of life, fostering and inspiring the visual translation of the transient essence of natural phenomena.
In Chen Xiaoyi’s imagination, the landscape is redrawn along the coordinates of transcendence, seeking an ancestral vitality that fuels a new dynamic perspective, surpassing the boundaries of human temporality; a tool to navigate a contemporary landscape fraught with difficulty and uncertainty.
“Spoken Leaves”见证了在陈萧伊捕捉存在本质的实践中，一次勇敢的僭越。
Imbued with a sense of temporal depth, Chen Xiaoyi’s works anchor the experience of life to indeterminate horizons, blurring the line between the tangible and the transcendent, seeking magical elements in everyday experience.
Spoken Leaves is a testament to Chen’s bold attempt to capture the essence of existence itself.
4k影像，黑白，15’35”，2024
音乐：司日纳·拉木加
4k, single channel video, B&W，15’35”，2024
Music: ལྷ་མོ་སྐྱབས། Bone Lhamokyap
近年，艺术家陈萧伊多次在横断山脉探寻高山深处的海子，自然中无以言表的万物，指向了某种原初的存在——不在此时此刻、不是现在，无法被语言描述、也无法被命名，一种未曾断裂的、完整的、却消失的风景。延续着她对于地质时间与尺度的探索，试图通过在自然中学习的“语言”，将生命经验锚定在了某个特殊的时空中，让影像去建构并显现关于原初坐标的“世界”。
影像展开了一段虚实交错的时空旅程，由追寻着白海螺的线索作为生态记忆的牵引，来贴近大地生命的叙事。全片由途中拍摄的静态照片组成，摄影对她而言是一种超越语言的语言，拥有对消逝却存在的事物，重新召唤的能力。在照片、记忆与想象的维度中，她借用媒介的魔力，重新以有限性与超越性的轴线，绘制一幅消失的风景，试图从充满浩瀚与寂静的图像中找到隐形的道路，让如谜的“世界”得以敞开和显现。她的创作，致力于从古老的事物中，发掘更为广义的生命力，以超越人类时空的视角来寻获存在潜在的能动，抵抗或结构性地超越今日世界。
In recent years, artist Chen Xiaoyi has ventured multiple times into the heart of the Hengduan Mountains in search of high mountain lakes. The indescribable essence of nature, pointing to some origin existence—not of this moment, not now, unable to be captured in language, nor named—a continuous, intact yet vanished landscape. Continuing her exploration of geological time and scales, she seeks, through the "language" learned in nature, to anchor life experiences within a special spatiotemporal dimension, constructing and revealing a "world" of original coordinates.
Her video unfolds a journey where reality and illusion intertwine, guided by clues of the white conch as ecological memory, approaching the narrative of the earth’s life. The work is composed of still photographs taken along the way. For her, photography is a language beyond words, possessing the power to resummon things faded yet existing. Within the dimensions of photographs, memory, and imagination, she wields the medium's enchantment, redrawing the axis of finitude and transcendence, sketching a vanished landscape, also endeavoring to find the invisible paths within images vast and silent, allowing the enigmatic 'world' to unfold and reveal itself. Her works are dedicated to unearth a broader vitality from the ancient, with a perspective beyond human temporality to discover the inherent dynamism of being, resisting or structurally transcending the world of today.
语言：英语
尺寸：125 × 190 mm
印装：专色+双色印刷，腔背锁线胶装
纸张：remake carapace，arena，sirio black
P for Pinecone，2024年3月
限量300册，每本手工编号
Size: 125 × 190 × 6 mm
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Including 40 images, 14 journals
Published by P for Pinecone, March 2024
Limited edition of 300 copies, each copy numbered
去年春日，我于山中第一次遇见它：所有的枝桠还未曾长出树叶，藤蔓却打结缠绕，枝头上盛放朵朵的浅黄色花蕊。住在附近的村民爷爷眯着眼睛对我说，“这是梦花。”我恍惚间露出困惑的表情，他继续说，“梦啊，做梦的梦。”那是一个寒风鼓动的阴天下午，在森林边缘驻足的我，便被眼前称为“梦花”，藤蔓环绕打结的植物所打动，这与创作者那隐秘的生命形态是何其相似。
近年来，在横断山脉的漫游里，我学习着自然的语言，也幸运地得到其给予的辽阔慰藉，做过一些作品与展览。但这本书中的摄影和行旅日志，却像梦花那一环环的“结”，只与自身在此生记忆的暗处里相逢，无关于结果，只有漫长且隐秘的生长，最终是关于创作或者艺术在冥冥时空之中，向我们指出的生命线索。
梦花是一种原产于中国与喜马拉雅山区的灌木，总于冬雪后的春天里开花，花集成球状，有类似于栀子花的香气。它的正式名称为结香花（Edgeworthia chrysantha），亦别称Paperbush，正如在中国西南地区——四川和云南等地——人们称其为“梦花”，有解梦之意。关于梦花，是否在缓慢生长中将自身缠绕并打结，真假并不确据。但遂以此为念想，作为这本小书的名字。
Last spring, I met it for the first time in the mountains: the branches had not grown leaves but were blooming with light yellow stamens while the vines were knotted and twisted. An old man living in the nearby village squinting his eyes, said to me, "This is the Meng flower." I showed a confused expression in a daze, and he continued, "Meng, the Meng in zuomeng (dreaming)." It was a cloudy afternoon with a cold wind. I stopped at the edge of the forest and was struck by the plant in front of me, of which the vines wrapped around and knotted, and its name means dream. How similar it is to the hidden living form of an art practitioner.
These years, I was learning the language of nature while wandering around the Hengduan Mountains, andwas fortunate to find vast solace from the mountain and thus made some artworks and exhibitions. However, the photographs and journals in this book are just like the twisted knots of the Meng flower, which I only encounter in the shadows of this life's memory. They are not about the result, but about the endless and concealed growing. In the end, they are about the life clues that are pointed out to me by the art and the creation in this unseen deep time-space.
Meng flower is a shrub native to China and the Himalayas, always blooming in the spring after winter snow. The flowers are gathered into balls and have a fragrance similar to gardenia. Its official name is Edgeworthia chrysantha, also known as Paperbush in the English-speaking world, just as in southwest China - like in Sichuan and Yunnan - people call it the "Meng flower", which means dream interpretation. Whether the Meng flower is entangled and knotted or not in its slow growth, this is the origin of the book’s title.
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了解书籍详情点击：P for Pinecone新书发布｜陈萧伊：「梦花」
陈萧伊(b.1992)生于中国四川， 现居成都。2014 年获伦敦艺术大学纯艺术摄影硕士学位。她的作品融合了多种媒介与形式，常生发于对自然与生命形式在不同尺度上的反思。在近年的项目中，她聚焦于中国西南横断山脉的历史痕迹，面对跨越尺度的地理与时间的存在之物，艺术家由人类的在场为起点，寻找不同存在方式的交汇之处，连接了宏观与微观的体验。在这种冷静的追溯之下，矿业的遗迹被揭示为多种视角的叙事、描摹及知识体系的具象化。她的作品曾获得中国第七届三影堂摄影奖大奖，入选福布斯2017“30 UNDER 30（Art）”亚洲榜单，她的作品已参加过多个国际展览。最近的个展项目包括“Spoken Leaves” (Matèria Gallery，罗马，2024)，“横断涟漪纪:我在说从深海听来的几个词”(千高原艺术空间，成都，2022)，“争执”(成都当代影像馆，成都，2020)，“他乡异客” (瑞士巴塞尔 LISTE，2019)；近期作品曾展出于于瑞士沃韦影像双年展，西班牙LA NUU摄影节，法国Mulhouse摄影双年展，东亚文化之都当代艺术节，厦门集美·阿尔勒国际摄影季，连州国际摄影年展，Paris Photo艺博会，瑞士Liste艺博会，伦敦艺博会，德国Folkwang博物馆，雅典Benaki博物馆，广东时代美术馆，深圳OCAT艺术中心，上海当代艺术博物馆，北京三影堂摄影艺术中心，成都麓湖A4美术馆等。
Chen Xiaoyi, born in Sichuan, China in 1992, is an artist based in Chengdu, Sichuan. She received her MA degree in photography from the University of the Arts London in 2014. Integrating multiple forms and media, the motifs of her works often derive from reflections on nature and existence at multiple scales. The recent series, she focuses on the Hengduan Mountains in southwestern China. Taking the present day as a starting point, the artist searches for the intersection of different forms of existence within the long durée of geological and cosmological time. In her artworks, the relics of the mining industry are revealed as the embodiment of narratives, descriptions, and knowledge systems from multiple perspectives. Xiaoyi Chen has exhibited internationally; she was awarded the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2015, China’s most prestigious photography prize, and named one of Asia’s 30 Artist under 30 by Forbes magazine 2017. Her recent solo exhibitions include “Spoken Leaves”(Matèria Gallery, Roma, 2024),“The Epoch of Rippling Hengduan Mountains”(A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu, 2022), “Streit” (Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, China, 2020), and “The stranger” (LISTE 2019 Art Fair Basel, Basel, Switzerland), and recent works have been exhibited at the Vevey Image (Switzerland), LA NUU photo festival (Spain), La Biennale de la Photographie de Mulhouse (France), Calling/re-Calling-Culture city of east Asia (Japan), Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival (China), Lianzhou Foto (China), Paris Photo (France), Liste Art Fair (Switzerland), London Art Fair (UK), Museum Folkwang (Germany), Benaki Museum (Greece), Guangdong Times Museum (China), OCAT Shenzhen (China), Power Station of Art (China), Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing), A4 Art Museum (China) etc.
In addition to the exhibitions and events in the over 1,000 square meters gallery space, A Thousand Plateaus Art Space also takes an active part in important international art fairs including Art Basel in HK, Art Hong Kong, Art Stage Singapore, Asia Now | Paris Asian Art Fair, ART021, West Bund Art & Design, JING ART, Art Chengdu, Photo Shanghai, Festival LOOP and Paris Internationale, LISTE in Basel etc..
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