Group Exhibition Guardian Art Cener, Beijing
The exhibition title, Stones from Her Mountain, is adapted from the well-known line in the Book of Songs (Shijing), "Stones from another mountain may be used to polish jade." By replacing the character "他" ("other/he") with "她" ("she"), the title not only foregrounds the identities of the women artists featured in the exhibition but also transforms the phrase's meaning and direction. According to chief curator Hu Danjie, this subtle shift provides the conceptual framework for an exhibition that looks toward the future, moves beyond gender as its sole concern, and explores the multifaceted relationship between visual art and literature in the age of transmedia.
To allow Stones from Her Mountain to achieve its transformative potential within an artistic context, the exhibition's four curators reexamined the theme and identified four conceptual trajectories connecting the past, present, and future.
Curator Cheng Xiaomu asks: "Having moved beyond the home, struggled for equality, and reconstructed subjectivity, might women today rediscover the meaning of the 'home' that they themselves symbolize?" Her section, Her Homeland, explores the hidden orders of growth and memory, the body and labor, through the artists' intimate and nuanced practices, imagining forms of communal life that transcend hierarchy and division.
For curator Zhang Yuling, "an affirmative gaze means attempting to liberate 'the gaze' as one of the fundamental aesthetic and spiritual acts of human experience." Her section, She in the Eyes, poses a question open to everyone: When the object of your sustained attention is defined as "she," what is it that you truly see? And how do you choose to express it?
The phrase Dashed Flame evokes fluctuating hidden emotions, incomplete combustion, interrupted energies, and a warmth deliberately preserved within one's inner world. Curator Zhao Xinxin explains that this section seeks to capture "the contours of the self as artists move between revelation and concealment—the outward manifestation of their inner worlds, alongside the ways they receive, absorb, and internalize the external world."
The seemingly fragmented title Life–Other–World opens, in curator Hu Danjie's view, "a passage toward higher dimensions of life." Through this theme, the artworks create an alternative reality: a space of continuous creation, a window onto the unknown, and a bridge that crosses established boundaries.
Through the dialogue between the four curators and the participating artists, more than one hundred artworks dissolve conventional boundaries between people, space, and objects, transforming them into a unified, perceptible stage. Stones from Her Mountain thus becomes an imaginative experiment—one that is playful, thought-provoking, and rich in meanings that extend beyond what is immediately visible or spoken.
Facebook
Instagram
WeChat 微信