11/09/2025 - 08/11/2025
Aria Art Gallery presents Some Peaceful Lights, a dialogue between Zhenhua Li, a leading figure in the international curatorial scene who is also active as an artist, and Walter Yu, a young Chinese artist working across painting, ceramics, and printmaking. The exhibition brings together the eponymous series created collaboratively by the two artists, alongside a site-specific installation of Yu’s daily drawings, which opens the show with an intimate, diarylike tone.
Zhenhua’s photographs, marked by a refined sensitivity to the nuances of light, captured Yu’s attention. Long engaged in the experimentation of techniques such as screen printing and etching, Yu found in these images a source of inspiration to reinterpret them through the lens of printmaking. The result is a series where photographic language intertwines with painterly expression, creating an original, unprecedented, and surprisingly harmonious balance. In Zhenhua’s photographs, light transcends its technical function and becomes a poetic substance, capable of generating time and space, evoking silence, and conveying a sense of stillness that permeates both architecture and landscapes. The artist’s gaze avoids linear narrative, favoring a suspended perception in which light becomes memory and presence. Walter Yu, on the other hand explores the tangible dimension of light. In the screen printing process, ultraviolet rays are fixed onto the stencil, transforming luminosity into a physical imprint. This material transcription engages in dialogue with the delicate chiaroscuro of the photographs. Yu intervenes with his own narrative sensibility, amplifying the mysterious aura of the images through layers of paint and color. Screen printing thus becomes the stage for a dual movement, on one hand the noise and labor of the technical gesture, and on the other the contemplative silence of the completed image.
Alongside this series, Yu’s installation of daily drawings introduces a complementary dimension, consisting of small sketches and studies that capture fragments of everyday life. This archive of intimate moments offers the public a more personal perspective on the artist’s work. Positioned at the entrance, the drawings welcome public as an invitation to a slow and attentive observation, where the delicacy of everyday life intertwines with images that can take on universal significance.
With Some Peaceful Lights, the two artists create a dialogue that questions not only the media of art but also the very possibilities of collaboration. The project explores the boundary between curatorial and creative gestures, between photography and painting, and between the intimacy of daily life and the reach toward a broader timeless dimension.