3-25 April 2025

Opening celebration Thursday 3 April, 5-7pm

Featuring works by Zhao Mengjia and Sing Gu. Curatored by Cheng Pinhao with Exhibition Executive Cao Yizhong.

The fear of death is a human instinct, and it is also a filter added to it by modern society. But if we look at death, or the disappearance of things, from a longer time dimension and a deeper space dimension, it has eternal value. Death leaves the living with memories of the dead, and memories are information elements that can transcend time and space. They can be preserved, copied, transmitted, and even misunderstood. Death gives the dead eternal existence in various ways.

Susan Sontag argued that photography allowed humanity to revisit and reinterpret specific moments, thereby extending the lifespan of memory—a notion closely tied to the concept of eternity. Inspired by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas's famous poem “Do not Go Gentle into That Good Night”, the exhibition hopes to interpret the relationship between life, death and eternity in an alternative perspective by exhibiting artworks based on photography as the creative medium.

Cheng Pinhao: Cheng is a curator and artistic creator born into an atypical Chinese family, and he is pursuing his master's degree in Arts and Cultural Management at the University of Melbourne. The environment in which he grew up deeply influenced and shaped his personality, behaviour habits and art creation. He tries to present his observations, thinking and ideas through different mediums and artistic forms, such as visual art, literature, music, and art curation. His current artistic practice centres around memories, dreams, and imaginations derived from real life, arousing people to think about the intrinsic connection between trues, reality, and illusions in our exact lives.

Zhao Mengjia: Zhao is from Hangzhou, China, and graduated in Photography from the China Academy of Art in 2022. She is currently pursuing her master's in Photography and Image Art at the same institution. Her multidisciplinary work spans photography, experimental video and installation art, which try to blur the lines between photography and painting. Focusing on themes of reality and surreality, temporal flux and eternity, and life’s fragility and resilience, Zhao uses dreams as visual rhetoric to wish to create works that echo her name’s meaning. (“Meng”梦 means Dream in Chinese).

Sing Gu: Her practice oscillates between anxiety and void, lingering on the edge of life as if pursuing an elusive inspiration, yet imprisoned by the weight of reality. By exploring emotions and the intertwining of dreams, her work seeks to uncover meaning within the cracks between life and death - perhaps there is no meaning, or perhaps everything is merely an illusion leading to nothingness. The youth wander on the brink of mental turmoil, attempting to grasp some truth of existence, to realize that the so-called truth is just a fabricated performance. Her work serves as a direct response to her inner world and acts as a tool for her to find her voice. She aims to create a captivating visual language that destigmatizes negative states from a female perspective, seeking a balance between the aesthetics of beauty and decay.

Cao Yizhong: Cao is an enthusiastic art curatorship student with a background in Economics and a passion for conceptual art and experimental exhibitions, possessing project management, public relations, and marketing skills. He is dedicated to exploring themes of contemporary Chinese culture and societal changes through innovative curatorial practices.