Cruelty, Softened

DURATION: 2026-04-02 ~ 2026-04-23

Cruelty, Softened does not point to a light, sweet, or naive world. It points
instead to the shifting of reference.
Every society depends on certain measures through which reality is understood:
what is acknowledged and what is obscured; what is remembered and what is
allowed to sink from view. These measures emerge from history, order, and
established narrative. Over time, they come to be regarded as stable ground. But
once that ground begins to shift, judgment loses its center of gravity. The past
can be rewritten, prevailing narratives can be replaced, and the structures of
value begin to loosen accordingly.
This shift first appears at the level of experience. Experience is constantly
rearranged: one part retained, another displaced, another muted. Gradually,
people become less certain whether what they have lived through can still enter
a shared reality. Judgment, too, becomes hesitant: what seemed clear yesterday
may already have been renamed today. In a city like Shanghai, one that
continues to accelerate and remake itself, this condition is especially
pronounced. Many experiences are covered over by new change before they can
settle into narrative.
It is precisely within this reality of gradually shifting reference that Cruelty,
Softened is posed. Here, the Chinese term nen carries the force of both a
symptom and a visual form. When sharpness is softened, the absurd is packaged,
and pain is cosmetically revised, value often enters daily life clothed in a bright,
comic, and deceptively light surface. The question, then, is whether people can
still recognize the moment when such changes take place.
This exhibition is concerned with how reality may continue to remain legible to
judgment. If “heaven” and “hell” are themselves produced through narrative, then
viewing is never neutral. Each of us relies on particular narratives to understand
the world, while also receiving the guidance of meaning through a visual order.
Taking the image as its point of departure, the exhibition examines how the
unconscious operates across society, history, and lived experience. Cruelty,
Softened seeks to render this process visible again, returning the viewer to
judgment itself.
Although the practices of Roger Ballen, Luo Yongjin, Yao Jui-Chung, and Lahem
do not share the same narrative path, each of them, in different ways, engages
this displacement of reference.
Roger Ballen pushes the image into the depths of the unconscious, using absurd,
distorted, and nearly disordered scene structures to keep viewing in constant
oscillation between the normal and the unbalanced. Luo Yongjin, by contrast,
works from history and urban experience. Through photographic archives and
spatial structures, he allows the residue of time to enter the present, while also
revealing how ordinary individuals reorder the center of life and their
imagination of fate within reality. Over many years, Yao Jui-Chung has surveyed
vernacular statuary and everyday visual systems, placing traditions of the
strange, historical legend, and secular humor side by side. Within his
disproportionate divine figures, belief and daily life are brought back into the
same visual order. Lahem begins from “Si Bei,” the mountain village in which he
grew up, binding the image to the concrete conditions of the body and memory.
Whether through his own formative experience, the death of his grandfather, or
the life trajectory of his childhood friend “Xiao Yanzi,” reality regains a palpable
weight.
These works do not attempt to provide reality with a new, unified explanation.
Rather, they shift existing narratives, making seemingly stable meanings
questionable once again, and compelling viewing to confront the burden of
judgment.
The exhibition title, Nen Tiantang (嫩天堂), is drawn from the Chinese title of Yao
Jui-Chung’s series. Here, however, it points to a matter of measure. It constitutes
a provisional frame of reference, making thought and recognition possible again.
When reference itself remains in motion, thinking ceases to be mere rhetoric and
becomes a way of realigning oneself with reality.