Mare

The exhibition features a short film, Mare, alongside still images that depict the struggle of awakening from deep sleep. The work delves into the unconscious mind, revealing fragments of dreams that illuminate deeper psychological processes influencing behaviour and perception. Mare presents the dream space as a parallel universe, where consciousness and the unconscious converge, exposing hidden thoughts, desires and fears. This exhibition encourages viewers to reflect on the unseen forces that shape their everyday experiences and understandings of reality.

‘This particular work was born from a strange estrangement – a sense of unfamiliarity with my own body. There is beauty: the texture of skin, the rhythm of form, the delicate arc of a limb. But stare long enough, and the body becomes uncanny, even absurd. Why does it take this shape? Why do I take this shape? What is the meaning of its presence – of mine? I often drift between waking and dreaming, questioning the nature of memory and perception. Memory claims to record the past, yet it exists only within the folds of the mind. So which is real – the remembered or the moment? The dream or the day? Perhaps there is no such distinction. Perhaps we are merely awake or asleep, suspended in an endless flux of imagery. That is why my works often breathe a sense of vacuum – the self adrift in an undefined space, reaching for form, for meaning.’ – Duo Duo

ARTIST 

Duo Duo is a multidisciplinary artist born in China, currently living between New York and Paris. She studied directing, design, and philosophy at Parsons School of Design, New York. Her creative process is instinctively driven, often emerging from a fleeting emotion or vague inner feeling rather than a pre-defined concept. She describes this impulse as a spontaneous reaction – a quiet urgency to externalise something unspoken. When the work is complete, it brings a sense of emotional release, as if an internal tension has been lifted.

For Duo, the moment of resonance – when her work reaches another – is deeply meaningful. It becomes a bridge that transcends solitude, allowing for shared feeling across distance and difference. Her practice explores memory, perception, and the search for form in liminal spaces. The tension between belonging and estrangement lies at the heart of her work, shaped by her own cross-cultural and transnational life.

Having navigated multiple societal and cultural systems, Duo often addresses the fragmentation between self and body. She uses film and painting to express this emotional complexity, viewing creation as a way not only to articulate personal feelings, but to reflect the emotional fractures and loss of belonging in contemporary urban life. Her work begins in the heart of the city, only to dissolve into abstract spaces.

‘What remains most authentic in my practice is the lived experience of the contemporary individual – the fragmented, fluid, and often introspective moments of modern life. I cannot truly know what it feels like to live someone else’s days, so I can only offer my own. And within my own life, I have come to recognise a common thread – one that resonates with many urban dwellers of this era. I have always lived in bustling metropolises, immersed in the flow of global cities where cultures collide and coexist. My upbringing and education unfolded across multiple cultural landscapes, shaped by the mobility and hybridity that define contemporary life. This multicultural, transnational experience is not a unique anomaly, but increasingly the norm – a quiet narrative shared by many of my generation who grow up moving between languages, systems, and value structures. It creates a constant tension between belonging and estrangement, between rootedness and drift – and this in-between space often becomes the invisible backdrop of my work.’ – Duo Duo

Duo was the creative director and assistant director of the film director Wong Kar Wai, participated in the Saint Laurent Paris SELF 05 art film, the Mercedes Benz ‘Where Does Your Heart Belong’ annual short film and the WKW Shanghai trilogy Blossoms. She had prior experience in curating WKW Cinema Costume Collection, the Tank Top exhibition, and the Weightless exhibition at the Spring/Break Art Show New York in 2021. Three pieces of the Mare collection were shown at the Darmo Gallery in Paris in 2023.

‘I attended traditional academic institutions and followed the path of a so-called “normal” life defined by elite education and social expectations. For many years, I worked in film – a medium grounded in storytelling, often beginning with the life of a single individual in the city, tracing their inner landscapes through their external environments. When I turn that lens inward, I find traces of that history embedded in my art. My background in film and advertising surfaces in subtle ways – a subtle theatricality, a quiet choreography of design. My themes often echo the emotional cadence of city life: its alienations, aesthetics, and rituals. My work does not emerge from the countryside, from remote regions, or marginalised spaces – it comes from the heart of the urban condition. From those who are everywhere and nowhere, from the familiar pulse of the city, from its bright surfaces and hidden voids.’ – Duo Duo

For Duo, film usually carries a complete narrative and is more grounded, more intimate with daily life, more rooted in realism. But for this exhibition, the short film Duo has produced is in the realm of the intangible. Unconsciousness can be felt during the REM stage of sleep as when a person wakes up, some flash of the dream can be remembered. Mare offers a wider field for abstraction, for wandering thought, for dreamlike expression.

CURATORS

Tong Dai is an emerging curator from Wen Zhou, China.

Yiwen Fu is a curator and artist from Hubei, China. 

Hualing Zhai is a curator from Zhejiang, China with a background in environmental and landscape design.