He Xun: Keys
Beijing
22th May -29th June, 2025
He Dun: Keys
Artist: He Xun
Exhibition: Keys
Duration: 22th May -29th June, 2025
Opening: 4 PM Thursday, 22th May, 2025
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…
He Xun, (1984 Born in Jiangxi,China) graduated from the Department of Education in 2006. Currently works and lives in Hangzhou and Beijing.Member of JIEJUE COMMUNITY.
Hexun’s works include paintings, poetry and curating with attention to the symbolic role of agricultural culture, wizard belief and literal haibts in daily life. He emphasizes on the impact on modern life caused by the ignored or suppressed languages, folk customs, totem worship, so as to seek for the common human emotional bonds, eternal memories and its deterioration. He's works have been showcased in Art Museum of Pond Loach, Imagokinetics (Hangzhou), Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Art, Times Museum, Guangzhou, Guangdong Museum of Art, A4 ART MUSEUM, Sound Art Museum,Castello di Rivara Centro d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy and Sovrapposizioni Di Immagini , Casa Dei Carraresi Museum, Italy; and collected by Start Museum, GeKA and etc. His poems and essays are published on journals as "West Lake", "Enclave", "Poem Jiangnan", "The Best Poems of China 2006", "Art World" and "Artshard"，Author of Portry《A Bird and Another Bird》(2024). Curation projects include "Go Live”with Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Art, "Suture: A Collection of Poetry by Contemporary Art Practitioners”with UCCA STORE, Beijing ，“The Preparation of Art: Creative Origins of Contemporary Chinese Artists ” with Art Museum of Quzhou and etc.
