4C Exhibition 2025 Q3 Fictions of Proximity
Rather than approaching intimacy or distance from a purely affective lens, the show maps a new topology of human connection
Words by Chenyang Nie
This June, 4C Gallery unveiled its Q3 2025 exhibition Fictions of Proximity in San Gabriel. In keeping with the gallery’s ongoing exploration of conceptual and contemporary art, this group exhibition presents a sharp and discerning investigation into the redefinition of “intimacy” and “distance” in the age of algorithmic living. Today, as digital media increasingly shapes our emotional experiences, our understanding of intimacy has long surpassed its physical dimension, becoming deeply constructed—and at times distorted—by technologies, cultural codes, and algorithmic logic. Within the gallery space, visitors find themselves immersed in a form of social psychodrama: they are no longer mere spectators, but implicated participants—both complicit in and critical of the illusions of closeness.
Bringing together the diverse practices of 8 artists, Fictions of Proximity exposes the evolving mechanisms through which the dynamics of seeing and being seen are orchestrated. Intimacy here is both a fabricated thread and a simulated interface. The exhibition transcends the boundaries of space and time, offering insights into how individuals seek presence and belonging in a society that is at once deconstructing norms and clinging to emotional attachment. Rather than approaching intimacy or distance from a purely affective lens, the show maps a new topology of human connection—interlacing visual culture, media technologies, human-machine interactions, cognitive bias, and the politics of the body.
Hu Di, Make a Friend and Have Hotpot
Hu Di: Reconstructing Identity in Hotpot and Fragments
Hu Di’s interactive installation Make a Friend and Have Hotpot invites viewers into a space assembled from carpets, Asian supermarket delivery boxes, and collaged skin-texture modules—an arena where the traps of recognition and misrecognition unfold. Participants are prompted to reconstruct a fragmented 3D facial puzzle, assembling a “friend” from scattered digital features. But who is this friend? Do they truly exist? Have we genuinely “met”?
Inspired by the superficiality of online social rituals—likes, DMs, screenshots, and virtual gatherings—Hu’s work parallels the cozy warmth of sharing hotpot with the virtuality and performativity of such interactions. Utilizing the materiality of technological skin and e-commerce packaging, Hu abstracts the fractured nature of digital identity into an experiential encounter. The viewer is compelled to question the autonomy of their perception: when algorithms determine our “recommended friends” and “social distances,” how much agency remains in our sense of familiarity?
Liu Chunxi: Who Has the Right to Name All Things?
If Hu Di interrogates misrecognition in digital social contexts, Liu Chunxi confronts the structural misrecognition embedded in anthropocentric classification systems. Her work draws on datasets—human faces from CelebA and images of crabs and ladybugs painstakingly scraped and sorted. The constructed nature of these datasets echoes the supposed rationality of scientific taxonomies—systems that, while orderly on the surface, are laced with bias and omission. Why must our cognitive frameworks assess biological value and hierarchy through a human-centric lens? Is this sense of proximity itself exclusionary?
Liu’s work extends beyond technical critique to philosophical inquiry. She proposes that true intimacy may begin with the decentering of the human perspective. Viewers are invited to adopt the gaze of insects and arthropods, reversing the direction of observation. This posthuman sensibility finds resonance in the writings of Donna Haraway, who emphasizes the ethical imperative of “becoming-with” as a foundation for future symbiotic relations.
The ceramic elements bear strong traces of handcraft and organic fluidity, resembling soft bodies or living forms suddenly frozen mid-growth. The bricks, inserted irregularly throughout the structure, are no longer mere supports but integral components of the work. Through this dialogue between materials, the artist responds to the exhibition The Order of Chaos—seeking order within disorder and rebuilding connections from fragments.
This piece lacks a clear center and offers no singular viewing angle. Each ceramic element carries its own posture and emotion, resonating with others within a system of fragile balance. Viewers are invited to engage actively, rethinking the meanings of structure, equilibrium, and perception. With a keen sense of intuition and material tension, Peng Jiaqi guides us to perceive new forms of order and possibility within a space on the brink of collapse.
Liu Chunxi, 人面兽心
Susie Luo, Untitled
Susie Luo: Soft Intimacy in the Wake of Scars
Turning from technology to the senses, Susie Luo’s paintings translate bodily experience into surface, replacing pantyhose with pigment, abstraction with tenderness. Her oil triptych stretches softness, haze, and vulnerability across the canvas through color, gesture, and texture.
The three-panel work, though seemingly detached from “real materials,” pulses with tension. Lines are tugged and tangled; colors, skin-like, appear supple yet marked by trauma. Here, intimacy resonates with the body—a site of physiological memory where scars and tenderness coexist. Luo’s sensibility recalls Louise Bourgeois’ late textile sculptures, where fabric, thread, and soft forms narrate the unconscious and corporeal. Like Bourgeois, Luo uses the material expansiveness of the female body to speak of suppression, repair, and regeneration, discovering contact points of connection through abstraction.
Xiang Yi’an: Silent Visual Detonations
Xiang Yi’an’s Shackles and Fracture appear in the exhibition as silent detonations—austere, restrained, yet emotionally charged. Shackles presents a suspended black form, whose stark geometry and taut materiality evoke locked voices and unspoken desires. It is not intimacy made manifest, but yearning unfulfilled—an aborted emotion. Fracture, through its richly layered surface, creates a visual rupture, compelling the viewer to pause and “touch” with their gaze. It draws attention to the fissures and quiet collapses of daily life.
Xiang Yi'An, Shackles
Lili Xie, The Penis Project
LiLi Xie: Gendered Gazes and the Return of the Distant Look
In The Penis Project, LiLi Xie fractures the dichotomy of intimacy and distance through gendered semiotics. Deploying commercial aesthetics, she critiques patriarchal constructs of the gendered image. Through satire and flamboyant hues, she exposes the artificial “gender intimacy” manufactured, recycled, and regulated by social systems. Her work oscillates between voyeurism and closeness, forcing viewers to confront their own roles in the spectacle—caught between mockery and denial.The fragments within the piece—blurred lip movements, flickering text, incomplete sounds—may appear chaotic, but they carry an underlying rhythm and logic. They invite viewers to feel the loss of communication and the limitations of language, while also uncovering a subtle yet genuine sense of order. This speaks directly to the central question of the exhibition The Order of Chaos: in the midst of disorder, can we find new ways to express ourselves?
By layering numbers, text, and images, the artist makes the invisible dimensions of “sound” visible, encouraging us to reconsider: What truly constitutes communication? When language fails, can silence itself become a form of voice?
This work is not only an exploration of sound and perception, but also a profound act of self-expression. Through its shifting visuals and fragments, it speaks in a gentle yet determined voice, inviting us to find our own sensory path and inner rhythm within the chaos and the silence.
Xu Weiyu: Future Cities and the Malformation of Time
Xu Weiyu’s delicate drawing systems render an unrepresentable future space. Here, intimacy is no longer interpersonal but inter-infrastructural—between humans and the built environment, between the self and the surveillance systems of the city. Through gridlines and diagrammatic abstractions, Xu reveals how “the violence of logic” silently governs visible space. Intimacy becomes a fictive horizon—fragmented and foreboding—prompting reflection on one’s positioning within the machinery of modern life.
Xu Weiyu, 升温海洋，人造冰山
Crystal Yao, 隐秘之井
Crystal Yao: Constraint and Display within Normalized Experience
Veiled Well uses photography, installation, LED lighting, and red stockings to construct a semi-interactive viewing environment. It powerfully examines the intersection of intimacy, observation, and menstrual stigma. The act of viewing becomes a gesture of social analysis—gendered closeness is rendered observable, traceable, performative.
Viewers must physically engage with the work, peering into partially obscured spaces. This simple motion overlays a charged social plane, highlighting how private experience is constantly surveilled, shaped, and systematized.
Zhang Liang: Violence and Rejection within Form
In Fusion Agent and Yielding to the Solid, Zhang Liang utilizes humble materials to stage a commentary on resistance. These works invite viewers to mold soft clay with their hands and place it within rigid structures—only to witness the soft forms harden into fixed components of a system. This participatory process becomes an elegant socio-biological experiment, prompting introspection on systems of formation and disciplinary aesthetics.
Zhang’s work suggests that proximity and distance cannot be simplistically defined as affective or spatial states; rather, they unfold as contested terrains shaped by social architectures, simulation, and adaptability.
Liang Zhang, Soft Resistance
Fictions of Proximity is not a mere exhibition about intimacy; it is a structural inquiry into our habituation to fabricated connections. In a world saturated by algorithms, interfaces, data streams, physical separations, and psychological illusions, our sense of intimacy is shifting—toward simulation, sampling, and proxy. The works in this exhibition serve as critical reminders: closeness is not necessarily proximity, and distance does not always entail alienation. As we assemble “new friends” through visual dislocations, are mirrored by other species in data models, encounter our own bodies in softened pigments, or confront the weight of silence in saturated hues—we are actively witnessing a transformation in how we look. This shift moves us away from the centered gaze toward mediated complicity, from physical contact to affective projection. In this new grammar of viewing, we are no longer isolated observers but co-authors of the very script of fictive intimacy.
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