Hive Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the presentation of ‘Burning Your Boats’, a group exhibition opening on 22 May 2024 at Hive Beijing space’s B and C galleries. The exhibition draws on the eponymous collection of short stories by English author Angela Carter, who reconstructed contemporary realities of collective perceptions by incorporating disparate narratives into the storytelling compositions of classical myths, folklore, religious stories, and Grimm’s fairy tales, exposing the underlying domination frameworks and power structures through a series of tactfully lingering and vibrant chapters of spirits. In this group show, the artists repeatedly absorb grains of salt hoarded in time and space, attempting to depart from the beginning of obscurity and chaos, probing and cruising through compacted histories and relics, and seeking the origin of creation concealed in the wheel of their destiny. Carter navigated between the classic paradigms, weaving an elaborate composition, which dissects and digests their system. With her penetrating perspectives, Carter removed old sinews while contributing new flesh to the bones. The creative journeys of the artists in this show parallel Carter’s subversive approach to writing. This exhibition intends to connect mythological narratives and the artists’ reference to the divine power in their practices, in an effort to reveal the undomesticated thinking embedded in the human senses.

The first chapter of the exhibition presents the artists’ radical imaginations and their preference for the aberrant. Shigeo Otake’s (b. 1955) The Demon Hunter, created in 1991, not only reiterates the religious motif ‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’, prevalent in the late Middle Ages and the Surrealist movement, but its triptych composition also reflects Otake’s dedication to Neo-classicism. The artist confines the otherwise grandiose and mesmerising scene to his residence, delivering an extremely personal interpretation of the narrative through the establishment of a manifold space. Cao Shiyi (b. 1990) traverses the gap in time and space; with the digital modellings of hybrid species generated by machine learning, she reconstructs single-celled plankton from the Cambrian period into new morphologies by hand-moulding and assembling through 3D printing. Using the latest AI technology, Grace Lee (b. 1995) creates a historical landscape underlying her work, which intertwines the mystical nature of the moray eel with the Norse mythological Jörmungandr, a creature that devours the world tree, with the intention of evoking a perception different from that of the present. In her most recent work, Yuna Yu (b. 1997) summons Chimera, a monster of Greek mythology. Rather than depicting the creature in its all-too-familiar guise, the artist imagines a quagmire of its birth, deprived of rationality and discipline. The ‘lure’, arising from the many ‘doubts’ prompted by religious narratives, mythological creatures, ancient beings, and contemporary technological methods, channelled their creative practices into something beyond the boundaries of civilisation and order, evolving into a landscape of spectacle.

In the show’s second chapter, Wang Wenting (b. 1985) and Wang Xinyan (b. 1995) each depict the destructive nature of two material forces and the consequent birth of new substances. The experimental approach of alchemy and its symbolic representation constantly ignites Wang Wenting to trace the source of its unshakable strength. Her latest works in the exhibition are not only contemplation on the laboratory cultivation of diamonds in her native Henan Province – matters grow and coalesce in hollows like seeds – an infinite mystery for the artist. Her installations and paintings emerge precisely from this tangible soil, and their connection with alchemy gives her access to even more boundless energy. The manipulative nature of the witch hunts in colonial Massachusetts and a series of historical events that took place during the period of social change from the 15th to the 17th centuries inspired Wang Xinyan in her practice. She explores the form of the altarpiece in her latest work, situating the power of heavenly descent at the centre of the ritual, surrounded by the elements of rising sparks as if it reflects more than just the darkest events and moments here.

Although destinies and equivalent sacrifices in mythological structures may seem far removed from the present and the ordinary, they are in fact concealed as undercurrents that influence and calibrate the instincts of human nature. In the exhibition’s third and final chapter, Li Xinyao (b. 1996) and Joey Xia (b. 1992) are equally focused on the cycle of life. The former associates physical experience and understanding of crime and punishment to her work, drawing the threads of thoughts to an entirely private realisation. The latter, on the contrary, connects his imagination of the Silk Road trace annihilated in the sandstorm and stitches the travelling sacks as an ascetic, embarking again and again on a fabricated virtual journey. Tan Yongqing (b. 1990) explores, at where human intellect originated, the interaction and extension between the divine and future technology like a DNA helix. Gong Chenyu (b. 1988) establishes a wilderness of mountains in which many mythological figures coexist; he keeps returning to the threshold where the divinity fades, and where memory lingers and flourishes, forging a boundary that is separate from reality. The thrilling moments of the ‘The Rape of Europa’ are replaced in Lu Yu’s (b. 1996) work by lingering ecstasy, where all solidity has dissipated, and where doubts and temptations are reconciled in a peaceful night’s sleep, while the narratives of the context become her entrances to many dreamscapes through the paths of time and space.

The tension and competition between the fixed existence and the infinite divinity have formed the very nature of humanity’s pursuit of spiritual life while the structure of the world that we always confront may just be the Blind Idiot God of Azathoth in the Cthulhu Mythos: the universe is nothing more than a cruel and purposeless dream of fantasy. The artists from this group exhibition have precisely detached themselves from their attention on logically rigorous images and colours in the objective world, and have instead sought the unrestrained expression of subjectivity. The exhibition attempts to build a three-dimensional space of discourse in flux where different paradigms and fragments of beliefs exchange information and impart secrets, where eleven forces of nature that are clenched in their mundaneness are presented here as the phases of their lives. Of all that cannot be grasped, they choose the islands of their own, surrounded on all sides by oceans that are to them not a perilous boundary separating worlds but a channel encasing the cocoons of the makers of secret rituals.