Moments in Suspension

“Truth-content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of subject-matter.”

—— Walter Benjamin

ART LABOR Gallery is pleased to present “Moments in Suspension,” Guo Tianyi’s debut solo exhibition in Shanghai. The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s recent works alongside a series of new pieces created especially for this occasion. The exhibition will run from April 19 to June 15, 2025.

Centered around the theme of the “moments,” this solo exhibition employs pencil drawing on paper to delicately depict floral imagery. Through this medium, the artist explores philosophical reflections on time, the dialectic between reality and illusion, and metaphoric insights into human life experience.

Guo Tianyi’s practice is deeply influenced by photography, black-and-white cinema, and poetic literature. His drawings subtly echo the visual qualities of photographic negatives: the inversion of light and shadow lends the flowers a luminous halo reminiscent of gelatin silver print, as if placing natural forms in the darkroom of memory. This treatment imbues the works with a poetic ambiguity that hovers between reality and recollection. His artistic approach reflects a meditation on temporality embedded within matter; the physical traces of graphite become a visual suspension of time’s passage. The finely controlled gradation of greys not only defines the aesthetic language of the work but also creates a dialectical interaction between the biological temporality of the plants and the artist’s own time of creation.

In Guo Tianyi’s hands, flowers are no longer static objects of depiction, but visual vessels for life’s metaphors. Within the confines of paper, a silent poetic drama of birth, bloom, and decay unfolds—resonating with the philosophy expressed in the Avatamsaka Sutra:“From the Buddha-land grows stems of five colors; in every flower, a world; in every leaf, a Tathagata. In spring the flowers bloom naturally; in autumn the leaves fall without regret. The infinite wisdom of the heart flows freely—silence and motion, speech and stillness, are all of one essence.” Amid the interplay of delicate strokes and hazy gradients, the quiet rhythm of life and the suspended state of time gradually reveal themselves.