Envisioning the emotions evoked by a particular scenario is how Xinyi Cheng approaches her portrait painting. The artist aims for her works to appear classic yet feel unfamiliar; this tension is reinforced by the classical frame structure of this piece. Xinyi has a longstanding interest in the element of “hats,” which she uses here as props for her figures. These seemingly ordinary yet subtle objects—such as the red envelope prop used by Faye Wong during an MV shoot, or the serene portrait in Nothing New in the Mirror (Revisited) (2026)—appear to assist the figures in the paintings as they embody their own roles.

The affectionate are always annoyed by the indifferent and imitation of Agnes Martin (2026) borrows a line from Su Shi’s Northern Song Dynasty poem “Butterfly Loves Flower: Spring Scenery” and depicts animal characters from the German public television program Die Maus (The Mouse). This program, which blends entertainment and education, is an iconic symbol of German visual culture. Whether it is the emotional state reflected in the verse “The Affectionate Are Always Tormented by the Indifferent,” the cute and childlike animal characters from the children’s program, or Agnès Martin’s almost restrained grid paintings, they all exist in a state of “indifference” or “silence.” In this way, Evelyn brings together the melancholy of classical poetry, the emotional resonance found in transnational cultural media, and the viewing experience of grid paintings.

The visual inspiration for Ascending Chimes (2025) comes from the 1950s Chinese classic “anti-espionage” film The Bells of the Ancient Temple, which tells the story of a counter-infiltration operation set in a Buddhist temple in the Central Plains. In his darkroom experiments, Peng Zuqiang manually exposed a sequence of 35mm film frames onto 16mm film, performing two offset exposures using two different colored light sources. He then fed this sequence into an enlarger and transferred it onto photographic paper, resulting in figures that appear to be suspended, as if in a daze, on a flight of stairs. Through the manual development and deconstruction of this film’s imagery, the artist seeks to establish intriguing intertextual connections between historical imagery and shifts in media.