黑料不打烊

Beeswax. Tree branches. Palm beds. Unique or unorthodox materials stride through Bounded Space’s most recent exhibition Somatic Memory, which opened last month in Beijing’s 798 Art District. The duo show celebrates Kang Jing and Zheng Jiang as they reach new horizons in their individual practices. Curated by Han Bing, the show is more an ode to the body than nature itself, as Jiang and Kang seek to weave a network of body-like forms through Jiang’s perfectly circular, waxy, beaming suns, two-dimensional flowers, pollen-like shapes, and candles on tuff beds, as well as a massive installation of beehives almost hiding the video work titled The longest way, 2025, inside, and Kang’s paper clay and hemp silk branches.

Zheng Jiang, The longest way 1#, 2025, Beeswax, 92 cm

Together, the artists connect on what it means to poetically use materials to communicate their query on how the human form and the natural form aesthetically align. Kang Jing, on the one hand, searches for the bone of the tree via its branches and extends the rest of the human form using epoxy resin or paper clay mixed with hemp silk. Kang believed that the bone was part of the vertebrate's body, and the mapping from bones to trees was the correlation of life forms. The natural form is revitalized by the "skin" to form a symbiosis between plants and the body.

Kang Jing, Bony #3, 2019-2022, Tree branches, epoxy resin, fiber glass, 135 x 75 x 120 cm

Artist Zheng Jiang, on the other hand, built a monumental building in the exhibition hall with beehives, which is the reproduction of memories. Jiang placed the residue of nature’s most essential helper, the bee, as a beacon producing many suns which line the gallery’s walls. The roundness of the beeswax is interpreted as the "shape of the sun", which once again suggests that the whole set of works points to the sublimated energy shown by the body in the predicament. When the body's feelings and implicit procedural memories are evoked, the body's memory is also activated.

Installation view, The longest way, 2025, Beeswax, beehive, iron frame

According to curator Han Bing:

Bones are the hardest and most resistant to decay, often used as metaphors for human character or qualities, such as backbone, chivalrous spirit, or pride. (…) When branches are connected with epoxy resin, fiberglass, and other materials to form a space curled like leaves, the branches as the skeleton reveal this “spirit” (…) So, is this space a pre-existing one created by the branches of a plant that the artist has recreated, or is it a space that the artist has unilaterally sought out between non-existent branches to carry their own aesthetic and conceptual vision?

Kang Jing, Bony #7, 2014-2017, Tree branches, paper clay, hemp silk, 130 x 80 x 50 cm

What I enjoy most about Bounded Space is their commitment to artists’ practice and ability to construct monumental exhibitions from that duty, as all artists are required to give the gallery two to three works as an exchange for the show and they highly encourage artists to do work that is built, installed, or created on-site. Out of this, blossoms unimaginable works like Kang’s Outline #5, 2025, a 3.5 x 4.1 x 6-meter plastered prism which extends from one branch. Jiang took this opportunity to also create at mass scale with The longest way, 2025, the installation made of beehives he brought from his father’s farm. His involvement on the farm and growing up there has had a large impact on his recent works.

Kang Jing alongside work Outline #5 at the Somatic Memory exhibition opening, August 2, 2025

Video works encapsulate viewers as well in the singular galleries to the back of the space with a standing room only gallery showing Kang Jing’s Passerby, 2021, which seems to speak to the oneness between the body, possibly death, and how we all become one again as he stages a performance in the film with a branch, holding it high as he enters the water on the lakeside of Liangzi Island in Hebei Province of northern China, only to disappear as he walks deeper into it. The other one, a blacked out viewing room just past the installation and tuff work Endless, 2025, which shows his behavioral recording video Coppe Mirror, 2018.

Video stills, Coppe Mirror, Behavior recording video, 2018

Bing provided some context for the Passerby video:

In June 2021, Kang Jing entered the water at the lakeside of Liangzi Island in Hubei Province, holding onto a tree stump as he swam toward the opposite shore of the lake. He swam to the opposite shore and back, completing the journey in one hour and thirty minutes. The work was filmed using a fixed camera position. As the person swam further and further away while holding onto the tree stump, they gradually disappeared from the frame, leaving behind a vast expanse of water and sky, with waves rolling and clouds shifting. Ultimately, the person and the tree stump reappeared in the frame, as if they were mere passersby in the empty landscape.

For me, the artists together muster a web of belonging to something larger than us that is intangible. By materializing the natural elements of the tree, the bee, and our own ephemerality, I felt that the combined works created a tension now only between the works’ impending decay but also my own.

Somatic Memory debuted on August 2, 2025, and ran until August 27.

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