Acintya is a term in Buddhist epistemology pointing to what conceptual thought cannot exhaust, suggesting the limits of reason in its attempt to grasp objects. In the exhibition acintya, the four artists Fu Xiaotong, Ni Youyu, Zhang Hua, and Zhang Kaitong approach this condition through distinct methods within their respective practices: images continually shift their relations to one another as they are read and reassembled, leaving perception unable to settle into any single interpretation, constituting the exhibition’s underlying thread.

Fu Xiaotong’s NUN-2026 series revolves around the states that remain after language, knowledge, and ways of seeing reach their respective boundaries. NUN-2026-1 and NUN-2026-2 share old book pages and covers as their material. In the former, beeswax seals the Great Mother, an archetypal image predating written language. In the latter, eye-shaped voids are cut into an old book cover and are filled with plaster and epoxy resin, casting them into form, yet they still appear not fully fixed. In both works, the facing pages remain blank—the forms of reading and looking persist, but their referent is absent. In NUN-2026-3, the artist repeatedly pierces handmade Xuan paper with a needle; dense holes gradually accumulate across the surface to form a field constituted by void, sustaining its form in a state of threshold. Through the series, the works reach the boundaries of language, looking, and form, and beyond these limits something unnameable continues to emerge and has never ceased.

Ni Youyu’s Two-Faced Figure (Inspired by Ancient Portrait Collage Sculptures) draws from the artist’s own archive of small ancient Chinese porcelain figurines, cast in cement and cut into fragments that are reconfigured according to correspondences of feature and structure, connecting figures belonging to diverse periods, genders and identities into new entities that correspond to no specific individual. His photo-collage series Freewheeling Trip operates under a similar logic: extracting and splicing formally similar areas from old landscape photographs collected from around the world. This approach resonates with the traditional Chinese concept of armchair traveling (Wo You, 卧游)—Landscape does not originate from observation, but from the extraction and recombination of idealized commonalities; within this process, formal affinity becomes a common standard across cultures and time, generating syntheses that cannot be traced historically or geographically.

Zhang Hua, raised in Yunnan, employs copper, the region‘s most common metal, as a medium to deconstruct and translate folk symbols. The copper surface in Fish Caveis gradually formed into a layered surface through oxidation and treatment, presenting a texture and structure that fall between mineral, excavated artifact and geological profile; the edges of the central hole are stepped, enabling viewing to shift between surface and interior space. Mountain and Wilderness Project / Spirit arranges multiple abstract forms made of metal within the attic space, their forms derived from plants found in mountainous landscapes. multiple individual entities are placed within the same spatial field, corresponding to the sculptural logic developed by late Qing artisan Li Guangxiu (黎广休) in his Five Hundred Arhats at Qiongzhu Temple (筇竹寺). In Pine Forest, Zhang turns regional mythological imagery into copper sheets through paper-cutting, removing them from their original symbolic functions and reconfiguring them as material forms within the exhibition space, where the relation between symbol and material surface is continuously reconfigured. Through recontextualization, ritual practice, folk belief, visual symbols, and natural elements are interwoven with material forms within the exhibition space.

Zhang Kaitong reworks historical image materials from his collection, with relations between image and knowledge persistently reconfigured through perception. Washed by Time depicts fragmented ancient mining scenes in silver lines that appear and disappear with the viewing angle; on the right side of the canvas, an encyclopedic sketch of vegetables appears. Mining scenes and botanical diagrams are placed within the same pictorial field, where different ways of producing knowledge remain in proximity. In The Beginning of History – 2, Greek frescoes, Chinese Northern Dynasties murals (5th–6th century), and traces of natural or deliberate damage are layered onto the same surface; areas of grey-white coverage and peeling become part of the pictorial structure, while the reflection of golden leaves varies with perspective. Across both works, images appear and disappear under changing angles of viewing, gaze, and movement, while meaning remains open and is continually reformed.

The four artists work through different strategies: fixing, reconfiguring, deconstructing, and layering. History, often treated as a stable frame of reference, is unfolded through shifting modes of looking. Reason reaches its limits in ongoing activity, and perception continues beyond its boundaries.