Exhibition Article - The Fissure of Perception
In the philosophy of perception, the world does not present itself to us as a complete whole; it unfolds at the very moment perception is activated. Merleau-Ponty's notion of "the becoming of vision" points to an unstable, in-between state, of instability, in which the subject has not yet reached the object, and the object has not yet solidified into a definable image. Painting often emerges at this threshold— a moment when consciousness, the body, and lived experience are caught in transition, still fluid and unsettled, as if opening a brief fissure on the canvas through which the world and perception reach toward, and into, each other. This exhibition takes that generative zone as its point of departure and situates the practices of Li Manjin, Meng Yangyang, and Misha within a shared conceptual framework. Their works do not construct external scenes but probe into perception itself, allowing the glimmer of consciousness, the posture of the body, and the sedimentation of experience to surface through pictorial relations. The exhibition raises a single question: when painting withdraws from the task of representation, how does the world reveal itself in the space before form takes hold?
