Wind H Art Center is honoured to announce its first large-scale group exhibition “Night is the Shadow of the Earth” running simultaneously in both Click Ten Art Space and Wind H Art Centre. The exhibition is curated by Xⁿ Office (Penny Dan Xu and Ni Youyu). With 27 artists and artist groups from around the world, this exhibition will present around 50 works featuring a diverse array of media such as sculpture, installation, painting, photography, video, animation, prints, antiques and archives. Under the theme of “shadow”, the artists explore the “unknown” and “invisible” in the fields of art, environment, society, psychology, and memory in divergent styles of creation.

Light and shadow are, like yin and yang, opposites that draw their natures from each other. Without light, there could be no shadow, but it is equally true that without shadow, the light would lose its power to illuminate: it is the contrast of light and shade falling on our retinas that allows our brains to discern the world around us. Yet, while countless artists over the centuries have admired, studied, and depicted light, very few have directly confronted the opaque shadow. The art of shadow has always existed, but it is often overlooked.

A shadow is cast by a physical object yet itself has no physicality. Thus, Shadow partakes of both the material and the immaterial and mediates between them. This exhibition takes “Shadow” as a shared visual theme, in which artists shape various types of shadow with brushes, dark rooms, plasters or pixels. Beyond the purely visual, “Shadow” has metaphorical meanings. Sometimes, it is a thread that links dimensions of time and space, a trace of the bygone. Sometimes, it is the ‘unknown’ in ourselves and our surroundings or the ‘invisible’ that happened to fall outside our view. Our title, “Night is the Shadow of the Earth”, is at once a scientific statement and a poetic metaphor. Our perpetually rotating planet casts across space its own Earth’s Shadow, through which we pass every night. In this massive shadow, we have given half our life to the “unknown” and “invisible”. The poet Joseph Brodsky once wrote, “The more invisible something is, the more certain it’s been around.” Everything comes from nothing, and the invisible forges the visible. Through the artworks in our “Shadow” exhibition, we hope to offer a glimpse of the immaterial substances that haunt our world.

The exhibition will be held in two venues: Click Ten Art Space and Wind H Art Center. It is worth noting that this exhibition is also the debut of several important artists who played a vital role in modern and contemporary art history, such as Claudio Parmiggiani and Nancy Sheung. During the exhibition, together with the curator team Xⁿ Office, the Wind H Art Center and the Click Ten Art Space will co-organize a series of special events including in-person workshops and online talks.