“Enter through the narrow gate” (Matthew 7:13)

“For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” This teaching of Jesus for his followers has grown broader in meaning over the later centuries: anyone who strives for an understanding of the Way and nature is heading for “the narrow gate” when he steps on a road rarely traveled.

The drastic backlash that globalization is suffering seems to have turned the world in a blink from absolute uni-polarity to diversity and fluctuation. In such a context, an evolution is also happening to the world of art: those grand isms and schools of art generated in a macro-historical age have become history, ushering in an unprecedented stage for how ordinary contemporary life influences individuals and how the latter probe into the nature of the world from a microscopic perspective. Artists are talented in a particular way that, while it’s inevitable for the world to be submerged in real and concrete life (reality), they can always find a way out of it so as to look at and transform the ineffable part of their life with reason and rich feelings.

This exhibition features artists He Xun, Shi Yi, Wang Zhongjie, Yan Dafu and Yan Wenhui, who each share their own unique understanding of the world in appropriate ways, despite their different vocabularies and expressions. “Just as crude minerals put forth precious gold and lead ore silver” (a verse from Sikong Tu’s Twenty-Four Styles of Poetry), they enter through “the narrow gate” of art to learn about the ever-moving stars of the universe.