Towards East, one gets a glimpse of two zones shrouded in darkened circumstances: from there, like fireflies, five artists emerge, observing their world from a diagonal perspective. Curators Marinella Sandra Paderni and Ewa-Maria Śmigielska, in collaboration with P420 Gallery, present selected examples of an infrathin gaze – visions born from specific perspectives, capable of perceiving the invisible essence of their present.
AA.VV. “An infrathin sight from East”, 2025, installation view, photo credit Carlo Favero,
courtesy P420, Bologna
In An Infrathin Sight from East, the private lives of Li Feifan (1995, Jiaxing), Xiang Xinyi (1996, Hunan), Shen Ziye (1998, Chongqing), Karolina Sadłoń (1996, Bielsko Biała), and Ana Vostruchovaitė (1995, Vilnius) become a pretext to recount something broader and more intricate: intimate glimpses whispering hidden chronicles of life in China and Poland. The exhibition unfolds through both diagonal and frontal discussions: a network of aesthetic and conceptual correspondences connects students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw with the students from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, creating dialogues that bring together two seemingly distant worldviews. Li Feifan’s painting is veiled in both technique and intention: in Unfastened Flowers (2024), a self-portrait with loosened nature suspended in an ethereal atmosphere, she reveals a pictorial dimension as suffused and delicate as the narration of her personal experience. One must look beyond the dreamy setting to find the subject’s gaze, where a scar invites us to penetrate the pictorial and interpretive layers of a liminal reality between what is permitted and what is unspoken.
AA.VV. “An infrathin sight from East”, 2025, installation view, photo credit Carlo Favero,
courtesy P420, Bologna
In aesthetic resonance with the Chinese artist is Karolina Sadłoń’s Self-Acceptance (2024), composed of a soft foam totem and video documentation of its transformation. The Polish artist creates a voodoo-sculpture on which the audience is invited to write words linked to their actual, ideal and expected selves. Acting as a butcher of a collective self, the artist shows through video how she discards these parts, lightening the metaphorical anti-monument and concludes the psychological ritual by tightly embracing what remains. In the opposite corner, another therapeutic artwork: Herbal Chronicles (2024) by Shen Ziye condenses her healing journey into a site-specific installation where traditional Chinese medicine and European allopathic therapy come together in the narrative and treatment of vulnerability. One stands before glass sculptures filled with medicinal flowers and a ceramic piece extending from the ground across a wall drawing, a sprawling rhizome evoking the lymphatic system. Resting on a bed of salt, the sculptures appear as remedies and models of dual nature, uniting two pharmacological systems that Ziye incorporates not only into her cancer treatment but also into her poetic practice.
AA.VV. “An infrathin sight from East”, 2025, installation view, photo credit Carlo Favero,
courtesy P420, Bologna
Facing this work there are two paintings by Ana Vostruchovaitė – Spirit of the Forest (2024) and Study of a Cat (2024). The artist reflects on her personal experience to translate it into paintings of re-possession: enchanted visions of her existential spaces, populated by fantastic creatures and bewitched vegetation, teetering on turbulence marked by acrylic grooves. Thus the artist reclaims what she is bound to, through a perception steeped in hybrid and liminal identity, questioning the relational dynamics that dominate her present. An oblique line links Vostruchovaitė’s works with Hear the Tigers in the Mountains (2024) and Crater Wind (2024) by Xiang Xinyi, whose artistic practice is deeply intertwined with her commitment to environmental activism – to the point of working solely with sunlight. Xinyi alternates broad, soft brushstrokes with fine incisions that define a natural world imbued with both ancient and contemporary events. There is a palpable urgency – that of someone caring for their habitat and witnessing the transformations, both ecological and cultural, that shape it. She might be called a “recent naturalist”: her work captures the essence of a world manifesting in its sublime and catastrophic complexity.
Shen Ziye, “Herbal Chronicles”, 2024, 51 paintings with Chinese medicine on paper, ceramic sculpture, 9 glass sculptures, variable dimensions installation. Photo credit Carlo Favero, courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna
The sensation of moving diagonally through the works recurs, just like the gaze of those who created them. Georges Didi-Huberman, in Like Fireflies: A Politics of Survival, draws on Hannah Arendt’s words to describe that diagonal force that allows one to survive in a world of dazzled vision and blurred senses. Only those who possess an oblique gaze, the outcome of a complex perspective and fragile geometries, can perceive these subtle essences, flickering signals from suffocated worlds, and reveal them with such delicacy that they remain fleeting yet visible like fireflies.
Ayleen Ivonne Liverani
Info:
AA.VV. An Infrathin Sight from East: Li Feifan, Xiang Xinyi, Shen Ziye, Karolina Sadłon, Ana Vostruchovaitė
curated by Marinella Paderni and Ewa-Maria Śmigielska
26/06 – 24/07/2025
P420
Via Azzo Gardino, 9, Bologna
www.p420.it
Ayleen Ivonne Liverani, a cultural practitioner in the fields of edu-curatorship and mediation, works between Italy and Mexico and explores the art world as a space for exploration and questioning, and as an opportunity to create and narrate alternative imaginaries.
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