Gene Gallery is delighted to announce the dual solo exhibition “Whispering Grounds”, featuring artists Gao Xiaoyi and Valentin Rilliet, which is on view from November 5, 2025, to January 4, 2026.

“Whispering Ground” is not merely a visual space, but a pictorial field of auditory consciousness. The resonance of color, brushwork, and light constructs a perceptible “visual soundscape,” where seeing transcends pure vision to become multisensory listening. In this context, painting transforms into a “silent acoustic device,” released from the narrative constraints of time, place, and center, unfolding in uncertain rhythms that generate continuous whispers. Layers of color emerge as tonal undercurrents, subtly and persistently shaping atmosphere; brushstrokes and blank spaces act as rhythmic intervals, tracing the undulation of emotion; symbols and figures carry the imprints of time and memory, leaving behind the lingering echoes of consciousness.

Within this whispering field, Gao Xiaoyi’s works inhabit a state of “speaking yet with a low volume,” allowing emotion to drift along the thresholds of memory and the subconsciousness, becoming the reverberation of personal experience. The female figures are neither defined narrative subjects nor social signifiers, but vessels of sensation—we cannot know “who she is,” nor can we locate any certain meaning she carries. By gazing upon the residual shadows of reality, Gao seeks to capture the subtle and elusive emotions embedded within individual experience—the faint sway of a body, the brief stillness of a gaze, the flowing light within a quiet room. In an indeterminate instant, unanchored by season or time, a translucent, introspective, and faintly melancholic atmosphere lingers across Gao’s painting. Within this silence devoid of narrative force, nameless emotions unfold like quiet breaths, dissolving into murmured soliloquies.

If Gao’s paintings embody “the aftertone of emotion,” then Valentin Rilliet’s works resound as “the echo of history,” shifting whispers from the psychological to the cultural dimension, from personal introspection to collective historical perception. Drawing upon mythology, tale, and symbolism, Rilliet intertwines the image logic of Western art with the visual traditions of the East, transforming the tension of bicultural identity into a spectrum of imagery. Within his deliberately ambiguous narrative structures, ghostly figures and symbols are detached from origin; like the whispers of cultural inheritance, they evoke events marked by history yet resistant to verification, ultimately manifesting as delayed historical echoes. Fiction and documentation intertwine, oscillating between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Rilliet’s work reconstructs a “quasi-historical” narrative while examining the boundaries of archival representation.

The works of Gao Xiaoyi and Valentin Rilliet converge like sound waves of differing frequencies—Gao’s turning inward, subtle and intimate; Rilliet’s expanding outward, vast and indistinct. Within the exhibition space, their paintings’ echoes intersect and resonate, forming a multidimensional, composite soundscape—both introverted and extroverted, private yet panoramic—revealing a suspended state that hovers between past and present, presence and disappearance.