2026 - Palimpsest of Layers

Artists
Wu Meng-Chang
Wu Tsan-Cheng
Shi Zhi-Ying
Sun Xun
Xie Fan

Lin & Lin Gallery presents the curatorial project "Palimpsest of Layers" launching in March, which takes as its foundation the creative practices of five artists—Wu Meng-Chang, Wu Tsan-Cheng, Shi Zhi-Ying, Sun Xun, and Xie Fan—examining how 'Forms' & 'Breaths' generate a shared syntax across their works. Here, 'Form' refers to visible structures, materials, and traces of matter; 'Breath' points to the intangible currents that follow form, including air, time, memory, spirituality, and perceptual vibration. Thus, Palimpsest of Layers is not merely a presentation of forms but an exhibition about how perception is written, layered, erased, and regenerated.

Wu Meng-Chang (b. 1971, Kaohsiung) captures the densest strata of time through stone carving. His engagement with stone is not an act of imposition but of listening—allowing the material to disclose itself, as if reading the hidden Breaths embedded within its density. In his hands, stone is not eternal; it becomes a compressed remnant of temporal flow. Weight, Form, and mineral texture serve as methods for inscribing time, overturning the presumed silence of stone and allowing Form to become a vessel for Breath.

Wu Tsan-Cheng (b. 1973, Yunlin) begins from sound, extending his inquiry into image and painting to explore how perception moves, disperses, and fades even before it is recorded. In his recent Negative Form Series, he uses locally photographed landscapes as a base, over which he mechanically engraves maps of Tainan, Chiayi, the Zhuoshui River, and 1945 aerial views of cities and waterways. These engraved marks resemble traces scraped away by time, while simultaneously summoning dormant memories of the landscape. Through the residual lines left after carving and intervention, he reveals a "negative temporality": what is removed becomes the origin of form, and what is erased becomes the passage through which breath emerges. In his work, landscape becomes not mere representation but a field of temporal layers, fragmented memory, and perceptual resonance.

Shi Zhi-Ying (b. 1979, Shanghai) presents the single work Ma-ni Stack, in which she responds to intention, ritual, and spirituality through the stacking of natural forms and the act of painting. Time, accumulation, and historical weight manifest through the material arrangement, transforming the canvas into a site of meditation and breath. What she handles is not only color or form but the placement of mind-breath within the picture. These forms exist without relying on human memory, yet they carry the traces of collective human history. Her work reveals breath within form, conveying a meditative rhythm and material gravity that allow viewers to sense the density of Form while experiencing the flow of Breath through its layered order.

Sun Xun (b. 1980, Liaoning) uses woodcut printmaking to navigate history, allegory, and personal memory. His carved marks are the most direct form of writing: to remove is to preserve, to destroy is to create. The hand-carved lines oscillate between the body and the wood, forming temporal vibrations. His work often employs humor, absurdity, and mythological motifs to reveal the contradictions of power, memory, and human nature, constructing multilayered spaces between the real and the symbolic.

Xie Fan (b. 1983, Sichuan) explores the ambiguous states between human presence and material through oil on silk. By employing the translucency of silk and the layered buildup of oil paint, he creates images suspended between formation and dissolution. Semi-transparent lines, drifting color fragments, and uncertain contours lend the surface a sense of breathing. Through delicate material handling, he loosens the definition of Form, allowing Breath to infiltrate the composition.

Across the exhibition, though the artists' materials differ—sound, stone, woodcut, painting, silk—they collectively form a structure of layers: layers of matter, time, memory, perception, and the intersections where 'Forms' & 'Breaths' meet.

Palimpsest of Layers invites viewers to encounter these works not only through their material presence but also through the subtle vibrations—those breaths—that linger behind forms, at the margins, and within gray zones. These layers are traces of long-term artistic practice and ways in which perception is reorganized and rearticulated in contemporary life. Ultimately, the exhibition offers not an answer but a question: Within each layer, do we truly perceive 'Form'—or the 'Breath' that moves through it?