Gene Gallery is delighted to announce the Dual Solo Exhibition “Pause for Collapses”, featuring artists Catalina Milea and Li Jun, curated by Huo Yanru. The exhibition will on view from June 8, 2025 to July 20, 2025.

A disquieting sense of instability descends the moment one encounters the works of Catalina Milea and Li Jun. Familiar scenes and everyday elements—under the artists’ orchestration—unfold into a multitude of unsettling possibilities. Yet these possibilities do not linger. At first glance, they collapse into an initial impression, only to resurface gradually as the viewer’s imagination begins to drift and deepen.

The concept of “collapse,” borrowed from quantum physics, lies at the heart of this exhibition. In quantum theory, every moment before its occurrence exists in a superposition—a state of multiple coexisting possibilities—until an observation or external force causes it to collapse into a single, definitive outcome. The works of Milea and Li, while rooted in scenes from real life, evoke fleeting personal memories—moments one might feel they’ve lived. Yet upon close comparison, these inner recollections never truly coincide with the images before us. Their intent is never to replicate reality, but rather to create some that transcend, distort, or strip away the expected and the orderly—like the apophenia (Klaus Conrad, 1958) or the simulacra (Jean Baudrillard , 1981).These constructs become the very source of each work’s intrinsic instability and expansive potential; in other words, Milea’s and Li Jun’s motives make the work itself a suggestion of a “superposition state”.

For Milea, reality and beauty resemble holograms—visibly present yet impossible to grasp or define. Her paintings probe the strange connections between the many facets of existence and the self, where speculation, contemplation, and intuition accumulate and coexist in every subject depicted. Li Jun, on the other hand, sets the stage for spatial disorientation. The seemingly mundane interiors in her paintings cannot exist in any coherent time or place. Empty of people, devoid of any “correct” exit, her spaces leave viewers suspended, compelled to strand in layered and nested thresholds.

This explains the strange undercurrent so effortlessly present within each frame. Every potential state within a superposition is formed by elements that, while drawn from the everyday, have been transcended, distorted, or dislodged from reason and order. The works resurrect fragments of reality that are often hidden or forgotten, concentrating them into a sudden detonation of the familiar. They shake our sense of normalcy, evoking what Freud termed the uncanny (das Unheimliche, 1919)—a feeling both intimate and estranged, both known and disquieting.

As these feelings unfold, the work’s quantum system collapses with the viewer’s first impression—simultaneously giving rise to another system, one that hinges on personal memory, association, and imagination. We hear how Milea, guided by a private holographic logic, communes with sacred forces of nature, losing herself in a beauty that is seen but never seized. We see how Li, through quiet elegance, unveils the latent violences enacted by structures of gender and culture—her unease transfigured into aesthetic poetics, a way of negotiating with the world. Yet when exposed under the viewer’s gaze, these gestures also appear to mock, with subtle defiance, the very systems of power they unveil.