London, July 21–25, 2025 — Introduced at Galleria Objects, 92 Brick Lane, London E1 6RL, Branches and Vessels: Ecologies of Kinship and Intimacy was Chinese language artist Xinyue Liang’s latest solo exhibition, providing an evocative exploration of ceramics as a language for reimagining household. Over 5 days, the exhibition staged a dialogue between two interrelated our bodies of labor—the Jar Sequence and the Coral Sequence—via which Liang interrogated the architectures of kinship, ladies’s progress, and intergenerational continuity.
The Jar Sequence drew inspiration from the acquainted silhouette of conventional Chinese language storage vessels. But these works exceeded performance, turning into repositories of reminiscence and have an effect on. Their textured surfaces resembled progress rings, wooden grain, or fragments of home life, evoking layers of inherited tales. Some rims have been intentionally irregular, signaling openness and permeability in communication, whereas different vessels stood tall and slender, embodying aspirations of continuity and resilience inside household buildings. Reasonably than containers for objects, they acted as materials metaphors for parental care, lineage, and the stress between inheritance and rupture.
In distinction, the Coral Sequence introduced ecological metaphors into the area of ceramics. Rendered in white porcelain, these branching buildings resembled residing organisms in fixed interdependence. Their kinds advised each fragility and resilience, mirroring the fragile stability of household dynamics and, extra particularly, ladies’s roles inside them. Some works appeared as flourishing coral colonies, symbols of vitality and progress; others offered extra summary configurations, hinting at symbiosis, negotiation, and the collaborative trajectories of kinship. The whiteness of the clay amplified this pressure—it was without delay pure and uncovered, concurrently weak and alive.
The exhibition design resisted linear storytelling. As an alternative, the jars and corals have been positioned in proximity, their kinds echoing and contradicting each other, creating an surroundings that felt much less like a gallery and extra like an ecosystem. Guests skilled kinship not as a hard and fast establishment however as a porous, evolving organism—negotiated, fragile, and relational.
Crucially, Liang’s method to ceramics didn’t depend on nostalgia or an easy revival of custom. As an alternative, she positioned the medium as a web site of translation, the place materiality and abstraction may open questions concerning the modern Chinese language household. Her works blurred the traces between the utilitarian and the symbolic, between private reminiscence and collective narrative, providing ceramics as each object and metaphor.
Finally, Branches and Vessels demonstrated that household is neither static nor unidirectional. It’s, like coral reefs or vessels of clay, a construction that accommodates, leaks, and regenerates. Liang invited viewers to think about kinship as an ecology: without delay fragile and resilient, intimate but permeable, rooted in custom whereas consistently being rewritten within the current.
Exhibition Particulars
Branches and Vessels: Ecologies of Kinship and Intimacy
Solo exhibition by Xinyue Liang
Galleria Objects, 92 Brick Lane, London E1 6RL July 21–25, 2025
