The Unspoken Community — Group Exhibition
The Unspoken Community — Group Exhibition
Duration: November 1 – December 21, 2025
Artist: Ying Xue, Yi Wen, Shuyu Wen, Kuang Zhu, Camille Theodet
Curator: Anson Chen, Krish Liang
Gallery: Absent Gallery
Venue: Shop 07-09, Block 11, Zhuguang Financial Town One, Huangpu Blvd E, Tianhe District, Guangzhou, China
Prologue
Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community (La communauté inavouable) exposes a cruel paradox: community is not a bond but a presence of absence; not a sharing, but an unshareable sharing. It is neither contractual nor utopian, but a perpetual state of désoeuvrement—manifesting in silence, resonating through rupture, and coalescing within absence.
This exhibition, through the material practices of five artists — Camille Theodet, Ying Xue, Shuyu Wen, Yi Wen, and Kuang Zhu — gives tangible form to a Blanchotian community that is “neither the same nor different.” It is confined within transparent boundaries, inscribed upon contradictory metallic surfaces, frozen in feral gazes, misplaced within the scientific systems of naming, and most delicately expressed through the mutations and fractures of ceramic.
The confrontation between animality and humanity in fractured imagery verifies Blanchot’s assertion that “the community can only manifest itself through negativity.”
These narrative-resistant visuals embody the core proposition of literary space theory: true connection occurs where meaning is suspended.
As Blanchot stated, community is not constructed through language but arrived at through its failure.
The mutated teapot subverts patriarchy’s obsession with “perfect replication” through the artisan’s physical intervention in molds. Differential repetition enacts the proposition that “community is the repetition of difference” (répétition de la différence). Each ceramic distortion deconstructs patriarchal knowledge systems, while every glaze imperfection becomes a silent witness to intergenerational trauma—ultimately reaching the core of Blanchot’s philosophy of language, where unspoken repression finds its most intense expression precisely in material fractures.
The dialectical structure of the diptych aluminum plates responds to Blanchot’s critical inheritance of Bataille’s “erotic community” (communauté érotique). The inscription “Communism” evokes Nancy’s ideal of “being-in-common” (être-en-commun), while the engraving “power struggle” exposes the inherent violence underlying all communal structures. This juxtaposition is not opposition but, as Blanchot described, sustains the community in a perpetual neutral state (neutre)—neither refusal nor acceptance. It is not a project but an endless waiting.
Cuvier’s misnaming and the harp sponge’s morphological aesthetics unexpectedly realize Blanchot’s conception of “involuntary memory” (mémoire involontaire).
When scientific communities unconsciously adhere to the misnomer “Umbellula,” they inadvertently practice what Blanchot termed a “community without community.”
This non-contractual bond approaches authenticity more closely than any deliberately constructed form of collectivity.
The mechanical circulation of dust storms within glass enclosures enacts Blanchot’s notion of “inoperativity” (désoeuvrement). These particles neither construct nor destroy; their gathering and dissipation become metaphors for “community without community” (la communauté sans communauté). When viewers’ shadows briefly intervene in this silent assembly, Blanchot’s “relation of non-relation” becomes materialized — community is sustained not through identification, but through separation. The community remains silent, for silence itself is a language. It is precisely in its unspeakability that the community attains its purest existence. Each work in this exhibition engages in a Blanchotian “résistance passive” (passive resistance). Here, silence no longer signifies absence but becomes a more essential mode of expression — manifesting through absence, connecting through rupture, and affirming the possibility of existence through the impossible.
The truth of community forever lingers at the threshold of “being on the verge of speech yet immediately withdrawn.” What this exhibition seeks to create is precisely such a suspended moment — when you leave, what you may carry away is not an understanding of community, but a subtle yet tangible awareness of the very impossibility of understanding.
About the Artists
Shell Series e; Right: Shell Series b — Yi Wen
Yi Wen（b.1995）Born in Hangzhou, based in Huangzhou, China
Yiwen born in Hangzhou in 1995, received bachelor's and master's degrees from China Academy of Art in 2017 and 2022.Currently lives and works in Hangzhou. My works revolve around natural environments and forms.Elements such as thorns and rings frequently appear in my works, derived from microscopic observations of nature. By using these phenomena from nature, I express a universality of the East, integrating and reconstructing the forms of plants, and exploring the relationships between various organisms, including humans and other living beings.
Shuyu's Shoes — Shuyu Wen
Shuyu Wen (b.1998), Born in Liangzhou, based in Shanghai, China
Master of Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, Bachelor of Arts in Photography from Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. Wen Shuyu’s practice explores how belief, perception, and intimacy take shape in an age of algorithmic drift, fractured attention, and unverifiable signals. She constructs pseudo-evidential environments immersive spaces that mimic credibility while quietly suspending proof. Through poetic sabotage, misused fragments, and fictional logic, her work operates like cybernetic witchcraft: summoning collective faith from instability. Humor becomes a soft weapon, speculation a method, as her installations probe how ambiguity and affect generate provisional truths in a post- verification world.
No Man's Land — Kuang Zhu
Kuang Zhu (b.1982）Born in Wenzhou, based in Huangzhou, China
"What I care about is the shared will and emotions of "human beings" (as the spiritual carriers of general beliefs), which are deposited in the uncontrollable external changes and the flow of time and space. At this stage, the creations are mainly installations. In terms of materials, I prefer to use raw materials and ready-made products, which are more simple, stable and larger information units."
Together — Ying Xue
Ying Xue (b.1993) Born in China, based in Shanghai
Her practice focuses on class mobility, family dilemmas, women's social movements, poetry, and political slogans, as well as narratives of subjectivity as Chinese women in global capitalism. Ying’s work encompasses social practice, installations, textiles and texts. She studied at the University of Leeds (Leeds, UK) as an undergraduate and subsequently at the Royal College of Art (London, UK), where she received her MA in Public Sphere in 2019.
Left: Incendie de la chambre froide 9; Center: Lacandeur consommée; Right: La récolte du penchant — Camille Theodet
Camille Theodet（b.1995）Born in Paris, based in Berlin
I create compositions that blend genres and ideas, constructing fragmented yet cohesive narratives. My work seeks to deconstruct emotions and actions by focusing on specific moments, confronting disparate images and concepts to form visual allegories. Through this process, I aim to establish analogies that maintain a deliberate ambiguity between subjects and genres. Each piece is an exploration of storytelling-depicting feelings, atmospheres, and actions by making images collide, yet allowing them to interact and resonate together.
Animals play a central role in my work, serving as symbols of raw emotion, intensity, and passion. I draw upon their primal behavior to explore human tendencies, seeking to capture an atmosphere of untamed sensuality. The animals in my work are unfiltered, embodying authenticity and truth-there is no room for pretense or artifice.
At the same time, I am deeply concerned with the place of nature, the animal, and the human in the world. By staging encounters between innocence and violence intimacy and destruction, I highlight the fragile balance of coexistence. My work suggests that the human experience cannot be separated from its relationship to other living beings and the environment-a tension that is both existential and universal.
My art delves deeply into the unspoken desires and emotions that lie within us. I repurpose familiar images, altering their aesthetic to heighten contrasts and evoke a photographic quality. By doing so, I aim to forge connections between visuals and stir profound human emotions. I blur the lines between genres crafting allegories that express ideas which cannot be captured by a single image alone. The compositions also carry a cinematic quality, where each frame feels like a moment frozen in time-imbued with the tension and motion of a larger unfolding narrative.
Ultimately, my work reflects a continuous exploration of personal existential questions and concerns. Each composition is an attempt to capture the essence of fleeting moments-emotions, actions, and subtle nuances-imbued with a sense of impermanence and depth.