Whitestone Gallery Beijing is delighted to announce the group exhibition The Fissures of Perception, featuring artists Li Manjin, Meng Yangyang, and Misha, to be held from January 10 to March 7, 2026. The exhibition will present a total of 24 works and 2 series by the three artists. An opening talk and reception will take place on Saturday, January 10, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM.

The opening panel discussion, brings together contemporary art curator Zhou Ying, art critic Liao Wen, artistic director of TARGET Cui Chun, and artists Li Manjin, Meng Yangyang, and Misha. From multiple perspectives—including artistic creation, critical discourse, dissemination, and the art market—the discussion explores how artistic practices are generated, viewed, and perceived.

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?

In Li Manjin’s work, images are not shaped through predetermined contours but emerge through veiling, dragging, and repeated gestures. Her brushwork does not aim at a fixed object but records the slight shifts of consciousness: lines converge and disperse; color blocks accumulate into structures that remain unresolved. The canvas thus presents itself as a site of formation, marked by the traces of a mind searching for coherence. Viewers sense a slow, persistent unfolding of time within these unstable relations, in which movement itself becomes the core of the image. Her works carry a sedimentary quality: perception appears through continual revision, and the extension of thought is held in suspension across the surface.

If Li Manjin reveals the generative motion of consciousness, Meng Yangyang turns toward the conditions that make seeing possible. Her paintings are perceived first as “points of entry into viewing” rather than narrative subjects. The body is broken into faint cues—a muted tone, a contour that never fully emerges, or a blank space that gently displaces form. The figures seem not yet ready to appear, maintaining a measured distance that shifts attention from identifying the subject to sensing how it comes into view. Visual focus cannot settle on a single point; it is redistributed across fragments, pauses, and intervals. Light, airy color and thinned spatial arrangements heighten this instability, positioning the body not as a carrier of meaning but as a mediator that reorganizes how viewing takes place. Meaning arises not from the depicted object but from the reconfiguration of perception itself.

In Misha’s paintings, color functions as the primary vessel of experience, creating a structure akin to perceptual strata. The movement of color, variations in luminance, and subtle spatial tilts point not to external scenery but to the ways memory takes shape within the body. Her palette carries both the specificity of place and the rhythm of psychological states, giving the image a sense of temperature and direction. Color is no longer a compositional tool but a means through which experience is reorganized. The paintings possess a quality of return: the weight of lived experience is delayed, preserved, and reactivated through the accumulation of hues.

While the three artists employ distinct visual vocabularies, their works converge on a shared structural premise: the image does not arrive with a pre-determined form but gains visibility through shifting relations. It is within this dynamic interface that the fissure emerges—not as rupture, but as a space that allows the image to be delayed, diverted, and reassembled, allowing appearance to take place. In this structure, viewing becomes less an act of confirming what is seen and more an attunement to how the image comes into being. The image itself never arrives in full clarity; it inhabits a zone of half-light, coexisting with the viewer. The Fissure of Perception thus points not to a theme but to an ontological tension: the world forms quietly in what has not yet been said, and it is within this subtle interval that the viewer reencounters both the world and themselves.