This article has been contributed by Hanni Huang x Sen Kwok.
In an era saturated by the monumental and the immersive, Changting Gallery’s Microverses offers a potent and necessary counter-narrative. The exhibition gathers sixteen international artists to propose the “micro” as a precise intellectual instrument for understanding our world. It successfully argues that true conceptual density is often found not in grand spectacle, but in the quiet fissures and condensed gestures of artistic practice. Moving through the space is like traversing a conceptual star map, where individual works—each a self-contained universe—exert a gravitational pull on one another, creating a dynamic field of thought that invites reflection on scale, perception, and existence itself.
From Unseen Forces to Ecological Tension
The exhibition’s inquiry begins with the unseen forces that shape our physical and ecological worlds. チャチャ (Chaucer XIE)’s installation, 水相 (Waterphase), provides a stunning entry point. By using low-frequency vibrations to make water droplets dance on a liquid surface, the work transforms a simple natural phenomenon into a mesmerizing meditation on the cyclical nature of existence. It reveals a hidden order within the inanimate, suggesting a faint pulse of life that connects all matter.
This sense of a fragile natural order is echoed, albeit with a more complex tone, in Jingjing Xu’s moving-image work, Something beautiful dies. The film masterfully intertwines the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware—a sensitivity to transience and subtle harmony—with a critical ecofeminist perspective. The symbolic space it creates—poised between the authentic and the synthetic—explores the melancholic beauty of a world where nature is mourned and replicated through artificial means. It serves as a poignant commentary on our fragile symbiosis with a vanishing environment, linking the loss of natural beauty with a critique of the dominant systems that accelerate it.
This environmental tension is brought into sharp, political focus by Tom Zelger’s photography. His stark image, Romeleklint, confronts the viewer with the dissonant reality of Sweden’s forestry practices. The landscape, stripped bare and silent, becomes a powerful indictment of a nation that profits from the erasure of its ancient woods, forcing us to question what is lost when a land rich in trees forgets the meaning of a forest.
The Body’s Microcosm and Female Agency
From the external environment, the exhibition pivots inward, exploring the body as its own complex and contested microcosm. Yuna Ding’s paintings, We are lovely people, offer a tender yet incisive look at intimacy as a threshold where identities blur and reconfigure. Drawing from her experience as a mother and woman, her figures lean into and shadow one another, their boundaries mediated by domestic objects. Otherness here is not a division but a generative space where connection is constantly tested and reformed through difference.
The female body’s ecosystem is examined with a different lens in Chaeyeon Kang’s 28days series, which juxtaposes virtual bodies with decomposing materials to reveal the fragile complexity of the female body’s ecosystem. Inspired by a personal experience with a yeast infection, the work uses edible materials like gelatin on prints of virtual female figures, allowing the works to naturally decay. This project is a visceral exploration of the tension between the flawless digital ideal and the unpredictable, vulnerable reality of corporeal existence, questioning how digital images can reveal hidden biological truths.
The reclamation of the body finds its mythological voice in Fanglin Luo’s performance video, ME & GODDESS & ME. Inspired by the vulnerability of walking alone at night, the artist turns to mythological goddesses. Through ritual and embodiment, the artist traces the transformation of Aphrodite from a figure of passive beauty to an awakened force. The work serves as a powerful ritual, aiming to reclaim the courage and agency that women are often taught to suppress, constructing a personal cosmos of resilience and symbolic power.
Particles of Perception and Cosmic Analogy
The exhibition further extends its inquiry into the very particles of perception and the abstract structures that underpin reality, bridging the infinitesimal with the cosmic. Anita Maczan’s paintings act as philosophical bridges between these two poles. N-body problem visualizes the unpredictable dynamics of spatial interactions with intense, energetic colors, reflecting the complexity of systems on both a micro and macro scale. Meanwhile, Gravity captures a figure suspended in a void, their form fragmenting and drifting, beautifully conveying a state of being untethered from physical laws and evoking a sense of subtle impermanence.
This cosmic-microscopic analogy is also central to the collages of Vukašin Delević. His series HeH+ and Spacescapes use fragile fragments of paper to build forms that simultaneously suggest atomic structures and vast constellations. His work invites a reconsideration of scale not as a fixed hierarchy, but as a fluid continuum, reminding us that the microscope and the telescope are merely two ends of the same conceptual axis.
This deconstruction of experience into its fundamental particles is perhaps most intimately explored in the realm of human emotion. Yuki Yuran Lin’s photographic series, Love Finding, atomizes the grand concept of love into what she terms “perceptual particles”—a fleeting glance, a tremor of emotion, a silent pause. The work magnifies these overlooked details, presenting love not as a singular narrative but as a dispersed energy, an “emotional microcosmos” of infinite, fragile moments that circulate between us. A similarly phenomenological approach defines Sia Li’s Realm of Perception series. Her paintings are not representations of the world or expressions of inner feeling, but attempts to capture the primordial moment of “perception” itself—the pre-reflective, raw encounter between the body and the world. Her fluid lines and soft colors create a dreamlike ambiance that visualizes the subtle, reversible connection between our inner state and our surroundings.
Internal Sanctuary and Socio-Political Resistance
Finally, the exhibition considers how these microcosms can function as sites of both socio-political resistance and internal sanctuary. Nara Beibit’s experimental film KELIN masterfully crafts a parallel between an abusive marriage and Kazakhstan’s colonial past. The title, meaning “the one who came to your house,” powerfully reframes the bride’s arrival as a forced intrusion, mirroring the colonizer’s violation of homes and lives. Through fragmented, symbolic imagery, the film becomes an act of protest, exploring themes of control, submission, and resistance within a confined domestic space.
In contrast, the artist duo KLOINM creates a literal sanctuary in Forest: Architecture Infinite Hexahedron. The central concept of Forest: Architecture Infinite Hexahedron draws inspiration from Korean poet Yi Sang’s poem Architectural Infinite Cube, which explores the poetic interplay between architecture and the infinite. This small, interlocking sculpture, made of organic materials, serves as a protective shield for the inner self—a physical manifestation of a mental refuge that sutures the unconscious and memory. It is a tangible representation of the “inner forest” where the self can remain protected from the external world. These themes are complemented by the work of Millianna Guangyi Luo, whose textiles translate the daily interplay of light and shadow into geometric order, and by the works of μDust, Yi Yaewon, and Jingkang Tu, who conduct personal archaeologies of bodily memory, dream fragments, and childhood sensibilities.
In its entirety, Microverses is a deeply thoughtful and coherent exhibition. It succeeds not by shouting, but by drawing the viewer in, demanding close attention and rewarding it with profound conceptual depth. It makes a compelling case that in the details, fissures, and fragments of our world, we can find its most essential structures. As Paul Klee wrote, “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible” —and it is in these sixteen quiet, condensed universes that the invisible forces shaping our existence are brought brilliantly into view.