Humanity has long struggled against its innate suffering, believing for a time that it had found the key to mastering its own destiny. Yet the sudden rupture of the pandemic stripped away the familiar illusion of stability, exposing deep fractures of fragility and uncertainty beneath. Abruptly confronted with their own vulnerability and insignificance, people are compelled to ask: how much control do we truly have over our fate?
As the grand narratives falter in soothing this inner unrest and anxiety, might it be time to turn our gaze inward—to reflect upon ourselves, to explore within, and to seek the invisible threads that quietly shape our destinies? Meanwhile, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence poses another pressing question: beyond all that can be simulated, calculated, and replaced, what remains irreducibly human? Might it be the primal, the perceptive, the fragile, and the untranslatable that constitute the essence of our existence?
Through the works of sixteen artists, this exhibition explores the body not as a vessel of logic, but as a porous, perceptive medium—one that absorbs, remembers, and transforms. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the exhibition embraces the body as a living structure of experience. The body is not something we merely possess, but something we are.
Perception, in this view, is neither a passive reception of sensory data nor a mental construction governed by reason, but a pre-reflective, bodily engagement with the world. Skin, as the initial interface between the body and the world, is no longer simply a boundary, but rather a landscape of sensation and memory, where trauma leaves its trace and fate presses gently against the flesh.