17th January 2026~ 22th January 2026
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Between Innocence & Reality
Venue: B.T. Batsford Gallery, London
Curated by: Hongqian Zhang
Artist: Lin Cheng, Jiarui Jiang
Between Innocence and Reality is a duo exhibition curated by Hongqian Zhang for ArtFlow Studio, presented at Batsford Gallery. Featuring Lin Cheng and Jiarui Jiang, the exhibition explores visual storytelling as a space where childhood, care, and lived experience intersect.
Working across illustration, artist’s books, and mixed media, both artists engage with childhood imagery not as a symbol of innocence alone, but as a nuanced lens through which vulnerability, memory, and resilience are negotiated.
Through this dialogue, the exhibition positions storytelling as both a gentle and critical language—one that allows tenderness and resistance to coexist. Between Innocence and Reality invites viewers to reconsider how early emotional frameworks continue to shape perception and identity, offering a space for reflection, empathy, and quiet transformation.
Lin Cheng’s practice navigates themes of emotional survival and gendered experience through poetic and metaphor-driven narratives, while Jiarui Jiang’s work draws on nature, humour, and everyday moments to construct playful yet reflective visual worlds.
In curating Between Innocence and Reality, Hongqian Zhang is particularly interested in how visual language can hold emotional complexity within seemingly gentle forms. Rather than positioning childhood as a fixed or nostalgic category, she approaches it as an active perceptual framework—one through which vulnerability, care, and resistance are continuously negotiated.
The curatorial structure allows the works to unfold gradually, encouraging a slower mode of viewing where subtle emotional shifts can emerge over time.
Zhang’s approach foregrounds storytelling not only as content, but as a method of connection.
By bringing together two distinct artistic practices, she constructs a space where narrative becomes a shared language—one that moves between intimacy and distance, softness and critique. In this context, the exhibition operates as a reflective environment, inviting viewers to reconsider how early emotional experiences continue to inform ways of seeing, feeling, and relating to the world.