LONDON.- In the intimate theatre of contemporary life, power rarely declares itself in overt gestures. Rather, it exists behind the surface of care, covered in affection, and supported by the language of love. Yuna Ding's first solo exhibition in China, "Tender Constraints," explores the process of soft control, where the act of loving becomes indistinguishable from the act of shaping. Drawing on her own journey as an artist and a mother, Ding refuses to separate emotional work from artistic production. Instead, she presents an archive of work that investigates how maternal attentiveness, ambiguity, and vulnerability might function as means of resistance within asymmetrical and expectation-rich social frameworks.

Ding's art creates a visual language for the indescribable textures of intimacy, including hesitations, paradoxes, and softly oppressive rhythms. Rather than depicting romantic love in its idealized form, she dissects its foundation: how care may turn into control, and how compassion can mask possession. Her characters are often faceless, their bodies porous and ambiguous, blurring the boundary between self and other, host and intruder. While Ding's experience as a mother influences her vulnerability and attentiveness, it does not dominate the story. Instead, it gently penetrates her material sensibility: her fondness for pliable, soft, and shape-shifting forms becomes a metaphor for the emotional elasticity demanded in uneven relationships. In these works, love is negotiated, and sometimes survives.

A central metaphor in Ding’s exhibition is drawn from Rabbi Abraham Twerski’s parable of “fish love”—a form of affection that masks consumption as care. Ding builds an allegorical stage where fish, fruit, and caged birds become recurring actors in the drama of intimacy. In one of the most iconic pieces, a faceless woman cradles a fish-like figure firmly wrapped in thread. The fish, with a body that resembles both flesh and a child,, rests limply in her arms—a visual knot of affection and domination. This is not tenderness in its innocent form, but a tenderness woven through with ownership, as if love were indistinguishable from possession. The threads are not just decorative lines—they are instruments of shaping, soft tools of submission.



In a separate composition, apples split apart along vertical seams, evoking vulva-like lips or wounds. They hover above a headless pair of bodies, from which long dark drips fall toward a birdcage positioned at their feet. The scene creates a symbolic cascade: desire congealed into command, care collapsed into enclosure. The canary, traditionally a sentinel of invisible danger, here sits beneath the site of intimacy—perhaps a quiet witness, or a warning. These symbolic configurations form a language where emotion is not only felt but managed—mapped into containment, encoded into ritual. Rather than resolve these contradictions, Ding lets them hum together, constructing a space in which intimacy and regulation appear as co-dependent forces.



Ding’s visual world is shaped not only by metaphor, but by material logic. Her preference for pliable forms—threaded contours, suspended structures, soft-edged surfaces—mirrors the psychological elasticity required in relationships marked by asymmetry. These visual textures fold and yield, evoking the pliancy often demanded of the self in the name of love. In one image, an apple-headed figure leans over a billiard table, striking a cue ball among others—one of which bears a human face. Desire is tuned into precision, the act of play becoming a metaphor for control. In another work, a figure lies atop an image of themselves enclosed within a frame. This doubling blurs the line between subject and representation, suggesting a longing not for reflection, but for fusion—a surrendering of self into an idealized or projected version.



Through these gestures, Ding constructs a visual ethic of resistance rooted in softness. Ambiguity becomes a strategy, touch a politics. Her refusal to clarify, resolve, or solidify the image creates a disruption, shifting the viewer from interpreter to witness. We are not meant to decode, but to feel the weight of forms that remain unfixed: how they swell, slip, and sink under the surface of what intimacy is supposed to look like.



Tender Constraints does not offer resolution. It creates paradox rather than closure, softly revealing how intimacy can serve as both refuge and restraint. Ding criticizes nor reclaims the relationships she evokes. Instead, she renders them in slow, tremulous textures, where control wears the mask of care, and affection transforms into obligation. Her works ask us not to solve what we see, but to stay with it—to hold space for discomfort, ambiguity, and emotional residue.



In doing so, Ding suggests a different way of looking: one that prioritizes attunement over interpretation and presence over mastery. This is not art that explains itself. It listens, folds, hesitates. And in that hesitation lies its quiet power—the ability to reflect how, in love as in art, clarity is not always the most honest form of truth.


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