If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,
Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime
Should hear my living feet, nor would I tread
Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of Time.
Let the new faces play what tricks they will
In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,
Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,
The living seem more shadow than they.
— The New Faces, William Butler Yeats
Pantomime in the absence of verbal narrative, the viewer to make gestures, movements and expressions to achieve the plot in a way that points to the unclear. The practice of Li Jiarui and Zhou Xinyu brings the audience into hidden fragments of thought by capturing certain fleeting emotions in everyday situations, recreating the memory or imaginary moment in a non-textual way, which makes their paintings and pantomime expressions present a commonality.
Li Jiarui's works are like constructing gardens, surreal interpretation of everyday natural scenes, adding before and after plots and narrative contexts to these unspeakable memory fragments, and constructing dynamic and wild illusions with large scenes, presenting a full-fledged chapter-back narrative. In Zhou Xinyu's creation, she focuses on using a variety of materials to reproduce specific moments in daily life. These specific memories are focused, frozen, and layered on the plane, making the original meaning more elusive, while allowing the material texture in the picture to present a new expression, bringing this fleeting memory back to the distracting moment.
In this duo exhibition, their works together point to a discussion of the broad semantic potential, the aphasia atmosphere constructed by the work itself, like the emotions deliberately suppressed by pantomimes during performance, so that the grotesqueness of grandeur and humor, as well as the glittering daily myths, are magnified in quiet solitude, bringing an energy hidden in the hustle and bustle.
