THE BODY AS A THRESHOLD

The Body as a Threshold is an international group exhibition that brings together thirteen artists exploring the body as a site of passage—where perception, memory, and the world meet. Across painting, installation, photography, video, and sculpture, the works trace thresholds from the trembling surface of the skin to the primordial interior of the womb, from urban surveillance to planetary climate. Sensitive yet incisive, the exhibition examines how the body both absorbs and resists the forces that shape contemporary life. Presented by Zhen Yi Gallery in collaboration with Sol de Paris. November 21–25, 17 rue Chapon, Paris.

The Body as a Threshold gathers thirteen international artists whose practices approach the body not as a closed form but as an open field shaped by pressure, memory, desire, surveillance, and time. Through painting, drawing, photography, digital work, installation, and performance, the exhibition examines how the body becomes the hinge between inner and outer worlds.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty described the body as the point where experience becomes real. This exhibition resonates with that notion. The skin becomes a vibrating boundary, where wax membranes, dispersed colors, and dissolving faces carry emotional traces. The womb returns as the first threshold, recalled through leather reliefs shaped by pressure, breath, and expansion, where perception begins before vision. Surveillance emerges as an ambient architecture, reshaping presence and behavior through the possibility of being seen. Planetary crisis enters the body, as thermometers display country codes, turning temperature into a geopolitical metaphor. Memory and longing fold into gesture, in figures caught between appearance and disappearance.

Across these works, the body appears as a site of negotiation delicate yet charged, vulnerable yet resilient. Every threshold opens into another. Being alive means being in contact.

Sol de Paris Edition

In The Body as a Threshold, the body is not merely observed—it is listened to. It opens like a half-lit doorway, letting the world breathe through. Thirteen artists gather here, shaping leather, wax, pigment, pixels, temperature, and movement to touch what resists language: the trembling before birth, the residue of emotion on skin, the shadow of surveillance, the heat of a drifting planet, the fold of memory, the blur of desire. The body becomes entrance and exit, witness and echo—a surface that receives, a space that holds, a threshold where time leans softly forward. Sol de Paris presents this exhibition as a quiet act of emergence—a moment suspended at the edge of becoming.

Artist Introductions

Ali Güleç
Ali Güleç merges portraiture, skull imagery, and natural elements into layered digital compositions. Miss and Mr Cage explore decay, memory, and transformation, balancing eeriness with serenity. These works reveal life persisting through dissolution and offer a contemplative view of mortality and renewal.

Chun Ding
The Space of Seeing uses cyanotype-inspired processes where chemistry, sunlight, and time interact with traces of life. Disruptions and overlapping marks reveal the porous boundary between body, environment, and memory, turning sensation into form.

Jiaqi Liao
In her Humming Womb series, Jiaqi Liao transforms veg-tan leather into sculptural reliefs that echo internal bodily sensations. Hands, Touch, and Swooping evoke the primordial threshold of the womb, where perception begins before sight, and where protection and constraint co-exist.

Jingyun Guan
Above Skin isolates hair from its familiar context, turning it into a symbolic threshold between the intimate and the unsettling. The work reflects on how bodily traces carry memory, identity, and time.

Juan Du
Drawing from the freehand aesthetics of Chinese ink painting, Juan Du’s small-scale oil works balance clarity and ambiguity. Fluid brushstrokes and childlike whimsy create a poetic yet playful visual language.

Katharina Lökenhoff
Antlitze is a series of fragile faces formed on translucent waxskin. Appearing and dissolving simultaneously, the works explore psychological, social, and existential thresholds—spaces of uncertainty, permeability, and transformation.

Masha Kiseleva

OAN
OAN’s works navigate states of lostness, transition, and emergence. Do You Know Me? depicts a wandering figure in a cold, expansive landscape. Maybe You Have Seen Me Already? marks a shift toward outward engagement. Lost (Expansion) translates the experience into abstract internal form, emphasizing emotional solitude and resilience.

Ori Aviram
In Maayan 1, a figure faces an unseen threshold, caught between presence and obstruction. Maayan 2 softens the boundary between body and environment, drifting between dreaming and awakening. Statues constructs a mythic, ambiguous tableau where meaning remains open and unresolved.

Ece Batur
Self Demolishes, Yet I Am Still Awake is a performance embodying cycles of collapse and renewal. Through repetitive gestures beneath a lace veil and surrounding soil, the artist reflects on inherited labor, domestic trauma, and resilience—where the body becomes both medium and archive.

Edmea
Edmea’s cobalt-blue figures inhabit spaces of vulnerability and reconstruction. Stitches, chains, and symbolic adornments evoke social and gender conditionings. Her works balance dense texture with negative space, presenting figures who stand at the threshold of self-awareness and liberation.

Rafael Triana
The Country in the Mouth transforms thermometers into political sensors. By replacing numbers with country codes, the installation uses fever as a metaphor for environmental crisis, political unrest, and migration—linking global instability with bodily vulnerability.

Xuying Li
Amnesic Butterfly captures gestures suspended between desire and retreat. Blurred bodies occupy an intimate in-between space where memory folds and unfolds, turning the body into a trembling threshold between presence and absence.