BEIJING.- CHINCHINART and BONIAN Space are pleased to jointly present Spreading Growth, a group exhibition on view from November 22 to December 21, 2025, curated by SHI Yurui and ZHANG Shuhan. Bringing together painting, video, and installation, the exhibition examines “persistent trauma,” not as a singular event, but as a slow seepage that accumulates through repair, mutates through repetition, and expands across personal, technological, and ecological dimensions.

Rooted in psychoanalytic and philosophical inquiry, Spreading Growth draws from Judith Herman’s assertion that “trauma cannot be cured; one can only learn to live with it,” and from Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion, which reveals how the mind continually reconstructs painful experiences. Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage further complicates the formation of selfhood, suggesting an ever-widening distance between the subject and the Real. Within this conceptual framework, the exhibition approaches trauma as a generative structure, one that spreads, folds, and resists closure.

The exhibition begins with the individual’s longing to prove oneself “not incomplete,” yet explores how lack exists not only within personal psyches but also within collective, civilizational narratives. Attempts to fix flaws or erase absence often reproduce new wounds. As Spreading Growth asks: In repairing the past, do we reconstruct, or do we merely displace the fractures we cannot resolve? The exhibition opens a space for returning to memory, allowing viewers to confront the wound at its source.

Across the exhibition, artists respond to this evolving structure of trauma from multiple registers. Rachel HO’s Marriage reanimates her mother’s wedding dress, transforming a symbol of blessing into a binding gesture that exposes matrilineal wounds. LIN Kaixuan’s Faith and I Would Like to Dance with Them in Midnight use shifting gazes and subtle bodily gestures to reflect on how women’s subjectivity is shaped and constrained within family structures, traditional aesthetics, and broader social norms. WANG Zhongyao’s Flesh freezes the surface of the contemporary body in technologically mediated stasis, revealing new forms of fissure born from the desire for immortality. In ZHANG Ziyi’s graphite and grass works (01/13/2024 pencil lead; 09/02/2024 grass), memory is cut, layered, and rewritten, emerging like a pencil tip slowly worn down across time.



Rachel HO
Marriage
2023
Mixed media on canvas
50 × 70 cm



LIN Kaixuan
Faith Woven
2024
Oil on canvas
80 × 60 cm



WANG Zhongyao
Flesh
2024
Latex sheets, latex tubing, silicone, artificial crystal, and cotton thread
170 × 76 × 32 cm



ZHANG Ziyi
09/02/2024 Grass
2025
Oil and mixed media, writing, and robotic technology
61 × 61 × 5 cm

LI Zhuoheng’s New·Nursery Rhymes contrasts seemingly innocent childhood scenes with the looming presence of digital conduits, exposing the invisible structures that shape subjects growing up in the era of ubiquitous technology. Zeleo ZHAO’s kinetic installation Blank Time fractures temporal perception through sand, mechanical rhythm, and dismantled clocks, suggesting trauma as a faint but persistent tremor. ZHANG Bin’s Whisper overlays fluorescent pigment onto old objects, allowing memories to glow back into visibility, revealing wounds shared between individuals, villages, and collective histories.


LI Zhuoheng
New·Nursery Rhymes
2023
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
200 × 200 cm


Zeleo ZHAO
Blank Time
2023
Quartz sand, aluminum sheet, and watch movement
Dimensions variable



ZHANG Bin
Whisper
2025
Video
5'28"

Extending trauma beyond the human subject, XIAO Liang’s Eco-Mutualism examines the fractures between civilization and nature, asking whether trauma might become a point of entry for ecological renewal. PEI Yankai’s Bedded on Cotton Wool presents an AI caregiver overly devoted to a deceased patient, portraying a form of delayed grief in which technology both soothes and prolongs, transforming closure into an endlessly extended absence.


XIAO Liang
Eco-Mutualism
Digital Video
3'17"


PEI Yankai
Bedded on Cotton Wool
2023
Single-channel video
7'10"

Rather than mapping trauma linearly, Spreading Growth presents trauma as a slow, continuous, and irreversible process, one that spreads, mutates, and expands, becoming a structure through which to rethink the body, technology, time, and identity. Ultimately, the exhibition suggests that while trauma signals a lack, it also opens a philosophical inquiry into existence itself.

Curators

SHI Yurui is a curator specializing in contemporary and cross-media art. Her practice spans alternative spaces and white-cube experimentation, with research interests in posthumanism, identity, ecological art, and decentralized exhibition formats. As the founder of CHINCHINART, she has curated projects in London, New York, Shanghai, Beijing, Suzhou, and beyond.

ZHANG Shuhan works at the intersection of digital art, cultural platforms, and the art market. Her curatorial practice includes exhibitions, art-finance initiatives, and cross-disciplinary collaborations. She has contributed to projects at institutions such as UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Tank Shanghai, and Eli Klein Gallery. Her research examines how technology shapes user experience, platform mechanisms, and the collecting behaviors of emerging buyers. As the founder of CHINCHINART, she explores experimental exhibition strategies in multifunctional spaces, fostering new dialogues between artists and audiences.

Artists

Rachel HO (b. 1999, Hubei, China) draws from fragments of memory and emotional echoes triggered in everyday life. For her, emotions often arrive with a delay; in this belated state of awareness, an inertia of thought pulls her back into the quiet recurrence of indescribable feelings and recollections, oscillating between pressure and the inability to release it. She once attempted to mirror herself through daily life as a form of reconciliation, only to realize that her sense of self is constructed through the continual process of creating, seeking, and assembling fragments. These tangible and intangible pieces, constantly reorganized across time and space, form the essence of lived experience: everything is connected to the self, and the self is merely a shifting node within an endless web of fragments.

Li Zhuoheng (b. 1994, Tianshui, Gansu, China) is an artist based in Shanghai. His practice centers on the human dilemmas and technological paradoxes embedded within accelerating technological iterations. Exploring the intimate relationship between humanity and future technologies, his works often reveal a raw poetic tension, one marked by rupture, friction, and an elemental sense of unease.

LIN Kaixuan (b. 2001, Shenzhen, China) draws significant influence from Douglas Crimp and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Her practice translates the perceptual pathways of bodily movement into the appropriation and abstract “restoration” of historical images, allowing them to detach from their original narratives while becoming closer to sensorial experience. Her selection of imagery arises not only from historical contexts but also from personal circumstances and psychological resonance; through de-historicization and transformation, images become contemporary “travelers,” departing from their origins to acquire new meaning in the present. Through a painterly language of deconstruction and reconstruction, LIN explores the multiple possibilities of female subjectivity. Organic forms that break beyond the frame and the juxtaposition of conflicting materials metaphorically embody the force of women breaking free from social conditioning. For her, painting is simultaneously a mirror of self-understanding and a window open to the world. Within the visual discourse of contemporary Chinese women artists, she proposes new interpretations of female agency, emphasizing freedom, growth, and embodied strength. Lines that escape the confines of the canvas mark trajectories that resist definition, while torn textures contain the energy of emergence. For LIN, boundaries are merely thin paper walls waiting to be pierced by vitality.

Pei Yankai (b. China) is a cross-media visual artist and designer who graduated from the University of the Arts London and is currently based in Beijing, where he works extensively with AI-generated imagery. His practice seeks to push against the physical boundaries of media and the fixed definitions of reality. Through the theatrical juxtaposition of private memories and fictional scenes, he blurs the line between the real and the imagined. Drawing from personal experience, Pei positions the act of revealing vulnerability and softness as a distinctive critical strategy, treating sensibility as a meaningful way of intervening in reality. Pei regards artificial intelligence as a “point of origin for transformation,” investigating how it catalyzes profound shifts across technological, social, and philosophical dimensions. He is particularly interested in how AI prompts an inward turn toward self-inquiry. The subtle evolution and reconstruction of intimate relationships, between people, between individuals and society, and between humans and the world, form the core of his work, unfolding within the continuous interplay of technology and sensitivity, and of reality and fiction.

WANG Zhongyao (b. 1996, Harbin, China) is an artist based in Beijing and a graduate of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. Working across digital video, installation, sculpture, and writing, her practice is grounded in historical research and material experimentation, forming a framework where rational structures and intuitive sensibilities coexist. Her digital video works construct a speculative and poetic language through nonlinear narratives and experimental text, exploring the thresholds between reality and fiction, and continually questioning the shifting relationships between body and world, interiority and exteriority, vision and perception. Her installation and sculptural practice intersect with her digital work, translating the suspended states, glitches, wiring, and intangibility of 3D modeling into metaphors for form and space. Through translucent materials such as latex, silicone, and resin, she brings virtual traces into tangible reality, generating nested dialogues across media. Through processes of translation and reconstruction, Wang grants familiar objects new perceptual dimensions, allowing touch and imagination to move beyond the boundaries of social discipline, traditional narratives, and patriarchal structures. Her work opens pathways for viewers to reimagine materials and mediums with renewed freedom. Wang was shortlisted for the 2025 Lumen Prize and has exhibited at institutions such as the Venice Arsenale, Tank Shanghai, Himalayas Museum Shanghai, and XSPACE Fujifilm Imaging Center.

XIAO Liang (b. China) is an artist and researcher currently pursuing a fully funded PhD at RMIT University (2022–2026), where she leads the Sustainability Group. She holds an MA in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2020), and a BA from the University of Wales (2017). Her practice integrates methodologies from sociology, botany, and technology studies, focusing on human–plant interaction, AIGC-driven speculative ecology, and nonhuman intelligence. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the London Design Festival, the Venice Arsenale, and the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, and she has received recognitions such as the iF Design Award, WRN Women Researchers Award, and OPPO Global Innovation Award (Top 10). Xiao has delivered invited lectures at the Sino-Italian Design Innovation Center (Tsinghua University), the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and the RIXC Art Science Festival in Latvia. She has published academic papers in international conferences and SSCI-indexed journals, including IASDR and HCII. Her current doctoral project, Plant Autonomy: Entangled Existence, Perception, and Intelligent Behavior, develops a methodology of “hallucination generation–interspecies narration,” reframing AIGC hallucination not as error but as an entry point for nonhuman participation. Over the past three years, AIGC has functioned as a co-agency in her work, generating fragmented images that detach from human cognitive pathways while reflecting subconscious structures with uncanny precision. In this exhibition, AIGC becomes both a trigger for “nonhuman regard” and a medium through which illusion reveals truth, enabling a posthuman reconstruction of future imaginaries surrounding memory, death, existence, and ecological interdependence.

Zeleo Zhao (b. 2000, Xinjiang, China) graduated in 2022 from the Public Art program in the Sculpture Department at Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts and is currently based in Shanghai. Working across sculpture, installation, and video, his practice examines how modern industry and material technologies shape the external behaviors and modes of activity of living beings. He explores the connections and translations between virtual mechanisms and physical space, while his mixed-media experiments trace the hidden relationships between natural environments and social landscapes.

Zhang Bin (b. 1996, Xianyou, Fujian, China) holds an MFA from the Fiber and Spatial Art Studio at the China Academy of Art (2022) and a BFA from the Academy’s Department of Fiber Art (2019). He is currently based in Hangzhou. Working across video, installation, and painting, his practice constructs an intuitively driven visual language marked by a tone of “romanticism.” Grounded in personal experience, his works reflect surrounding realities and refract historical, social, and everyday conditions, while also engaging broader questions concerning the tensions between technology and nature.

Zhang Ziyi (b. 1999, Beijing, China) is an artist based in Chicago, where she also teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2023) and a dual BA in Art and Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis (2021).

As a cross-disciplinary, project-based artist, her practice spans painting, web-based work, performance, video, and writing. She navigates and negotiates the spaces between technology and labor, the individual and the collective, playfulness and critique. Her work consistently returns to the processes of revisiting and reimagining lived experience, constructing spaces where the boundaries between reality and fiction blur, opening possibilities for challenging dominant narratives and revealing deeper, less visible truths. For Zhang, being an artist extends far beyond the act of making; it is a holistic way of living, a commitment to practicing art as life. Her work embodies patience, focus, and an ongoing investment in self-renewal and self-challenge, treating artistic practice as a sustained mode of inquiry and existence.