Aura Hunter

In June, sunlight begins to reach us with a glaring intensity, passing through the plane trees and appearing at the edges of the dormer windows. We may look away and retreat into the shade of the plane trees. We may look straight at it, until we reach the outline of the self. In June, as the warm wind first rises, we forget ourselves, or see ourselves once again surrounded by early summer.

Aura Hunter: if light is a straight line, one end originating in the subject and the other reaching toward the object, then the two artists in this two-person exhibition, Ruoxi Ren and Tang Linglong, reshape this line in their images, in two directions and with different techniques. Light thus becomes complex. It is no longer only a glaring instant; it gains a nonlinear variability. It is aura, and all of us within it are Aura Hunters.

Returning to the works: Ruoxi Ren’s works include painting, composite wall installations with light, and interactive installations. On first encountering this new series, one has a sense of familiarity, as if meeting a scene that might arise in one’s own cognition, a scene in which the self is bound to blur. It is like a lucid dream whose drifting direction is necessarily unknown. As a member of the “screen generation,” she divides her life experience into “first nature” and “second nature,” and the visual experiences the two bring are neutrally merged and layered in her images. Yet her light is independent; her light is what she sees, and we are the ones who merge into her light.

By Yuqing Shen