As part of Alisan Fine Arts’ 45th anniversary programme Then and Now, this exhibition at Alisan Atelier runs parallel to The Chinese Avant-Garde in Paris at our Central gallery, with both exhibitions part of this year's French May Arts Festival Associated Project. Where the “Then” honours the francophone Chinese masters who forged modernism in post-war Paris, the “Now” gathers four contemporary artists—Li Donglu, Qi Zhuo, Shi Qi, and Yao Qingmei—who currently live and work in that same city. Each has created and selected works specifically for this exhibition, transforming inherited materials, images, and ideas within contemporary spatial and conceptual frames to recast lineage as a living engine for the present.

Embodied Time

Yao Qingmei extends her acclaimed performance practice into material form. Alongside documentation of her experimental work—where body, thought, and gesture become inseparable from expression—she presents eroded films developed from footage of her Parisian flânerie. These images materialise time itself: the erosion of the film surface becomes a meditation on presence and loss, memory dissolving and reconstituting before the eye.

Shi Qi contributes works from her Traces des Jours series alongside new acrylic on canvas pieces. Her paper reliefs continue the exploration of “the fold” as infinite variation, like a silent melody distilling temporal essence. Inscribing Buddhist scriptures, ancient poems, and painting references onto paper before covering them with ink, she folds her homesickness as a traveller into layered sculptures. Some retain traces of sacred text; others carry impressions of Chinese painting or calligraphy, sedimented layers of private and collective memory. Her acrylic works translate these concerns into abstract compositions exploring time and emotion through colour and gesture.

Cultural Collision and Repair

Living in Paris as foreigners, these artists examine their condition through a Chinese perspective. The collision of cultures sets the backdrop for Qi Zhuo’s subversive sculptural language. We present his Bubble Game series, where coloured blown-glass bubbles attach to fractured Buddhist torsos like seals, crystalline forms that protect stone at stress points while framing dynamic posture. This focus on the damaged body encourages pacing oneself according to bodily needs; in Qi’s reflection, time and healing proceed hand in hand, recognising the absurdity of obsessions with physical perfection.

Li Donglu draws on classical Western draftsmanship alongside Chinese pictorial thought, orchestrating light, colour, and precision to open contemplative, cosmological vistas. In his works, Greco-Roman sculptures appear wedged between rocks in sombre landscapes, figures suspended between civilisations. Working in oil paint, he constructs dramatic dreamscapes where nature becomes a theatre for cultural memory and surreal displacement.

Matter as Memory

From Li’s cosmological vistas and Yao’s meditations on time and loss to Shi’s folded reliefs and abstract canvases and Qi’s reparative sculptures, the exhibition demonstrates how media becomes memory’s voice. Each artist employs distinct materials—oil paint, eroded film, inscribed rice paper, acrylic, ceramic, blown glass, metal—to explore the chemistry of cultural exchange through process. Matter holds memory and gives it voice: not as preservation, but as transformation.