TRIUMPH GALLERY is pleased to announce “Emergence”, the artist Xu Qu’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, from 7 September to 13 October, 2024. The exhibition starts from the diversity of Xu Qu’s works, including paintings, images, installations, sculptures, and wall paintings and wallpapers, presenting artists’ thinking on the relationship between different issues and the operation of social systems in different media creations. 

This exhibition supplies us with a threefold imagery: the pit of an oozing, silt-filled, dimly lit pond, a labyrinth of infinite mirrored reflections, and the unfolding lines of the force of a gyroscope. Just as a novelist who enlists the dome as a device that merges real place, mental realm, and literary space, the artist’s task is to expand such dome into a site, an actual experience, or, in the words of Samuel Beckett, a conceptual statement that is wholly transformed into a phenomenal world of experience. The exhibition, entitled “Emergence,” offers its audience a play, in which the threefold imagery of the pond, the labyrinth, and the gyroscope is layered and split into three progressive acts. Here, however, chronology no longer plays a decisive or restrictive role: time is spatialized in the gallery/stage, like another variant of the dome. Yet there is an opposite movement running through the play, from contraction and sinking—in Proust’s case, the spirit has shredded the “indigestible shell” of matter and concrete things and returned to the inner world of its selfhood and memory—to diffusion and emergence, from the “slough” of materiality and the “shell” of concrete matters something is about to emerge and reveal itself. 

In this exhibition, Xu Qu made his position clear: spirituality is not a false and outdated fantasy, nor is it an object to be worshiped. If art itself is already a realization and confrontation of nothingness, then an art that tries to state the existence of spirituality is the direction that the artist strives for.