1st August 2025 ~ 7th August 2025
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Undercurrent
Venue: Fitzrovia Gallery, London
Curated by: Hongqian Zhang
Artists: 20 emerging artists across painting, installation, video, and sound
I wanted to build a contemplative environment where stillness could be felt, not filled; where resonance could arise without resolution.
Undercurrent was a group exhibition I curated at Fitzrovia Gallery in August 2025.
The project emerged from my interest in the invisible emotional and psychological forces that shape how we move through space—what lingers beneath language, beneath structure, beneath performance.
The exhibition featured 20 artists from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. Their works explored themes of emotional latency, internal resistance, and imperceptible transformation through painting, moving image, sound installation, and site-responsive spatial interventions. Rather than presenting concrete narratives, the works encouraged viewers to slow down, to attend to subtle shifts in tone, vibration, and energy.
As curator and spatial designer, I created a layout with no fixed entry point—only thresholds.
Some rooms were hushed and dim; others softly reverberated with sound. A faint breeze moved through sheer materials. Wall texts were intentionally minimal, written more as poetic notations than expository captions.
The goal was to disarm the habitual interpretive gaze and instead activate a more bodily, intuitive mode of reception.
The title Undercurrent refers not only to emotional underlayers but to an entire curatorial approach: one that privileges atmosphere over clarity, relation over instruction.
In a time saturated with noise and visual demand, this exhibition became a space for suspension—a quiet interruption where the viewer might encounter something previously unfelt, but always present.
Participating Artists:
Baoyue Zhang, Sammy Lai, Xiaobin Zhang, Jordan Leung, Yingxin Yan, Amar Shrestha, Alina Burkovska, Lingfei Shen, Haopeng Yang, PinChing Wu, Xinyue Liang, Minyu Zhu, Anni Li, Xiang Li, Xing Zhang, Abbas Khan, Yiping Gu, Longfei Jiang, Yiyi Song, Bingge Liu
2025