Neutrality in most cases denotes a blandness, boredom, or refusal to take a position. Yet this refusal anticipates a rapturous state. According to French philosopher Roland Barthes, the Neutral is what baffles the paradigm. Rather than positing what simply "is" versus what "is not," the neutral indicates a free field to suspend discipline and posit play. What this looks like can almost be overlooked: preciosity, sweetness, innocence. In this baffled paradigm, these minor aesthetics are not redundant, but exalted in their reduction.

Barthes cites in his epigraph an excerpt from Lao-Tzu to prove his point: "The others seem intelligent; I alone seem a naive. The others seem totally discerning; I alone am stupid. I seem tossed by the currents, as though I hadn't a place of rest. The others all have their labors; I alone am limited like a savage. I alone, I differ from the others in that I respect the Nourishing Mother." Naivete here, rather than ignorance, indicates a refusal of mastery. The origins of life can only be understood through this refusal.

The curatorial principle of this exhibition is based on such "naive" portrayals of nature, and Nature here is anything but the opposite of artifice. Instead, the artists outplay such dichotomies by deploying landscapes, zoomorphic creatures, angelic entities, and feminine bodies with a softness that tips over into the amorphous and even rapturous. Such images' rapture takes neutrality as its vehicle: in revealing themselves, they antithetically synthesize a dissolution.

~ Xindi Li 李欣迪