Sitian Zeng

Exhibition Statement

These works bring together three years of thinking and making developed through my PhD research, Painting as an Approach to Explore Immanent Subjectivity in the Post-Digital Age. They invite audiences to slow down and experience painting as an operational field rather than a static image, seeking to evoke a sense of reaching, touching, and becoming.

The paintings begin with intuitive and embodied acts of painting. Watercolour and ink overlap, diffuse, and intertwine through the movement of water, while figurative forms remain partially concealed within their layers. Traces of ink and carefully rendered details transform the surface of the paper into something resembling ripples across water. For a moment, it is as if a fingertip touches the surface: ripples spread outward, and images begin to emerge.

Such momentary disturbance resonates with how I experience the post-digital condition: a world of fleetingness, indeterminacy, and transformation, in which things can increasingly be translated and reorganised through code. At the same time, the physical act of touching a screen resonates with the recurring hand gestures in my paintings. For me, these reaching hands express a desire for embodied entanglement with virtual space in the post-digital age: a desire to reach across the surface and touch the digital information that appears to exist just on the other side of the screen.