Every day must fall into the dark night, as if there were a well that locks away the light. 

One must sit at the mouth of this dark well, patiently fishing for the light that has fallen inside.

— Pablo Neruda

The alienation produced by image-based spectacle treats pixelated virtual associations as real bonds. The absurdity lies in the fact that the more we pursue “visible connections,” the more profoundly isolated we become. Yet the forces that give rise to these dark islands are not located in some detached “great beyond”. On the contrary, the distance between humans and things resides within the very time that flows around us and the silent spaces we inhabit.
Painting resists the dominion of rational systems through the body's sensuous presence. Within a digital age in which “seeing becomes a passive act of selection,” reconstructed logics allow the body to reforge the link between cognition, memory, and temporality, deploying eruptions of contingent feeling to confront disorder and helplessness.
The darkness we unintentionally glimpse is never the whole of what exists; light, also, lies concealed within it. As in Neruda’s well, what imprisons light is not void, but the unknown that allows it to settle. The fissures left by vanished flashes, the silences beneath the noise—these become moments where reality and perception interpenetrate, where the unspeakable quietly calls from the darkness, awaiting revelation.
The ineffable “Outside”, as Patricia MacCormack described, encompasses spacetime itself while interweaving with all things—akin to a silence beyond existence, one that neither rational nor sensuous traces can replicate. Yet artists are compelled by an impulse toward this unknown. Through the act of capturing light from darkness, they transform a “world that exists independently” into a “world that exists for us,” answering a deeper call: to become the other, to become a conduit for the unspeakable.
True resistance may lie not in rejecting technology, but in reactivating a nonhuman, almost dreamlike creativity. In her Signal: Submarine Network series, Tang Mu renders global communication infrastructures—fiber-optic cables buried beneath the ocean floor—as visualized “digital constellations.” Merging satellite imagery, microscopic images, and traditional oil paintings, she resists the algorithmic monopolization of memory. Through the slow, corporeal practice of painting, she reinscribes cold data streams with warmth and temporality. Her “signals” do not merely transmit information; they summon lost connections. From the digital chaos, she gathers algorithmically scattered light, forming constellations meant for gaze and empathy.
Han Xiny’s works, such as Hesitation of the Wind and Words Almost Spoken, capture the fleeting interstice between presence and disappearance through layered brushstrokes and fluid color. Her practice, situated between London, New York, and Shanghai, is shaped by transcultural experience yet remains grounded in an inward, spiritual pursuit. In an era where emotion is often compressed into the background noise of digital interaction, Han insists on the dilation of time through painting--allowing emotions to settle gradually through the seepage and accumulation of color. Her images often hover at the threshold of speech and silence.
Wang Yifan’s works—including A Moment, Day and Night, and Sunday— stem from a sensitive perception of everyday life. Focusing on the duration and passage of time, he seeks a balance between the eternal and the transient within constantly shifting forms. Through theatrical compositions, his works open onto nomadic spaces that connect inner consciousness to the external world, hidden beneath unknown structures. These paintings revisit otherwise overlooked moments of life, sustaining a condition in which what is gathered from nature returns to the inner self. They offer a gentle resistance to algorithmic regimes of vision while reconstructing an authentic connection between self, nature, and lived experience.
Yu Wenjie’s works—such as Dreamt of a Prophecy at Dawn and Night Soil #2—interweave sculpture, painting, and installation to construct vast yet intimate spiritual ruins. Describing himself as someone who experiences the world through insecurity, Yu fills his works with illusion, fantasy, and fragments of memory. Within his practice, time and space collapse and reassemble. His creative process itself becomes an adventure—dissolving boundaries between materials, media, and narrative to embrace rupture and incompleteness, thereby preserving the ambiguity and openness of human perception.
Sarah Fripon, a German-born artist based in Vienna, reassembles everyday domestic objects, obsolete product photography, and desire-laden symbols culled from disparate eras. Through collage-like arrangements—sometimes heavily altered, sometimes nearly intact—she replaces grand narratives with associative chains of thought. Her work harnesses the power of citation, sampling advertisements, film stills, vintage prints, and contemporary 3D-rendered images much like sound samples. As past and present collide within a single frame, time becomes unstable and fluid. This temporality flows through her brushwork, disrupting algorithmically driven visual uniformity and restoring warmth to the ordinary. Her work functions as a kind of reclamation, gathering fragmented light from the digital chaos and reconnecting the inner self with the external world.
Evgeniya Dudnikova constructs a Jungian symbolic universe through surreal imagery such as horses, centaurs, and violet-hued houses. In works like The Guest, The Pollinator, and Centaurus, she merges nature, mythology, and personal dreams, challenging anthropocentric modes of perception. For Dudnikova, the “Outside” is not a separate other, but a projected field of inner spirit. The horses in her paintings function as both spiritual vessels and embodiments of nonhuman existence, moving between reality and fiction.
Lucas Kaiser’s works—Three Apples, Fish Tank, and Golden Fruit—depict floating human figures, severed hands, and crawling amphibians, rendering the familiar strange. This form of “profanation” is not violent but gently disruptive. Viewing ceases to be passive reception and becomes an encounter that requires courage.
Genuine darkness and crisis do not emerge from nothingness or the unknown, but are embedded within the very “world that exists for us” that we have constructed. The constant generation of new digital symbols and image logics collapses spectacle into a hyper-chaos of drifting, accidental signs. Vision ceases to be an active gaze; power no longer resides in fixed visible structures, but disperses across minute deviations within data flows. Refusing passive compliance, the artists fish for light within infinite différance, rebuilding emotional and cognitive connections. They become perceptible sources of warmth within the well that “locks away the light.”
Light has never truly disappeared. Artists are those willing to sit at the rim of the dark well, fishing for it with patience and courage. Their works provide no definitive answers, only echoes; they are not windows, but things in themselves— palpable, estranging, and articulate. In this sense, art is not an escape from the world, but a profound act of care for the world that threatens to abandon us.