Hunsand Space (Beijing) will present He Xun’s solo exhibition Keys on 22 May 2025, marking the artist’s third solo presentation at the gallery. Across these three exhibitions, He has unfolded a poetic reconfiguration of the visible and the invisible—offering a proposal for an “alternative modernity,” wherein cultural memory is reconstituted as personal mythology. The result is a metaphysical system of affective signs deeply grounded in an Eastern sensibility.
The exhibition titled Keys reflects a decisive return to themes from He Xun’s earlier phases: Rural Rhapsody,Fibonacci, and Sowing a Sun. In the Rural Rhapsody phase, He Xun transformed fields, star charts, and ritual implements into hallucinatory visual elements, searching for the residual presence—and possible resurgence—of spiritual meaning within the soil of lived experience. His parallel practice in poetry infused the work with an additional dimension: literary fragments, seemingly scattered but compositionally precise, appear on canvas in dialogue with visual forms. These textual images accrue metaphorical charge, becoming vessels for allegory. By juxtaposing poetic language with visual reality (or installation), He constructs an image system both absurd and affectively saturated—fusing folk metaphysics with the fractured emotional landscape of contemporary life. This highly subjective configuration becomes a means through which the artist reinterprets traditional rural cosmologies: shamanism, tools, and belief structures, all brought under renewed scrutiny.
In subsequent series like Fibonacci and Sowing a Sun, motifs of nature worship and phonetic seed-glyphs began to appear. Adopting the roles of diviner and alchemist, He Xun projects spiritual parables onto the modern artist’s identity, framing creation as a mediumistic act. Here, human rationality clashes with nature’s ultimate unknowability—the fissure between them becomes an aperture for seeking existential meaning.
The exhibition features 13 new works. Images of conches, birds, wings, and keys—rendered flat or volumetric—gradually evolve into totemic forms (tǔténg) through iterative cognitive and emotional refinement. Across civilizations, He Xun wields this totemic key to access pre-linguistic realms, asserting subjective certainty in the face of the unknowable. In his vision, even within an enigmatic world, the "known" key unlocks hidden chambers of emotion.
Keys will be on view until 29 June 2025. Concurrently, He Xun will present the twin project Assassin at Hangzhou’s nonprofit space Clubhouse: found keys scatter chaotically or soar to pierce the void…
