Hive Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the 6th edition of Hive Art Research Project, Stellar Perspective, on view from September 12 to November 4, 2026, in Hall DE at Hive | Beijing Headquarters. Curated by Liu Liyao, the exhibition presents more than nineteen works by thirteen artists: Dong Xiaochi, Fei Yining, Liang Fu , Ji Xin, Kong Qian, Liu Lu, Hongrui Henry Liu, Tan Yongqing, Wang Wenting, Wang Xinyan, Yang Xinyi, Yuna Yu, and Zhu Xiaohe.This exhibition intends to initiate an act of seeing. Through a primordial, still, pre-experiential stellar perspective, we observe the world of meaning gliding like shooting stars within artworks. It seeks to prompt reflection on how we may perceive and negotiate essence and appearance in this anxious, accelerated era, to re-evaluate and re-stabilize our existential realm where meaning keeps slipping away.

A planet

at the velocity of desire

crashes into the dark skin

of the cosmos

Like an unclaimed

love story

From the star’s vantage

sea and land share

the same edge

— Anonymous

Imagine a world without language, prior to concepts, writing and technology. Imagine the primordial world given-to-us-directly: a star enfolded within cosmic narratives. Standing upon it, we enter into direct dialogue with the non-propositional, pre-linguistic world of intuition. At moments, we witness consciousness, language and theory flicker past like planets. Soon enough, however, we return to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s silent, pre-linguistic perceived-world. Adopting the stellar perspective, we examine the foetal dreams we project onto artworks.

Freed from the discipline and jurisdiction of language, pause at one corner of this star and behold artworks as planets. Language clinging to them is merely an instrument. A single word, a brush-stroke, a patch of colour, even a single act of figuration may all be echoes left by countless utterances streaking across space. Perhaps an artwork marks the limit of repetition: a branch of the universe generated by infinite permutations of perceptual possibilities. Boundlessly diverse, it is a uterine galaxy endlessly producing planetary phantoms-phantoms of phantoms. This is an intertextual universe, one that time seeks constantly to make us forget. Time sets cycles in motion via the birth and death of light, and hardens memory through experience. When language pauses to fix its gaze, it loses its significance, turning into inorganic matter condensed from what we see and hear. We may negate language through an inner gaze; or we may invent a language that speaks only to ourselves. This is what the stellar perspective stands for. Artworks ought not perpetually transmit experience. Both linguistic and meaningful experience should be cast aside at a proper moment. We must step out of inter-spaces, free ourselves from the anxiety of influence, and reach toward a field yet to be assigned value.

What this exhibition sets out to unfold evokes, in part, Eugene Thacker’s world-without-us. That is: observing planets from a star’s position, seeing from a world unburdened by human presence. We set aside lived-in experience to feel, examine and contemplate the “in-itself of the world” that artworks endeavour to manifest. Within the “human-centred world” to which we are accustomed and in which we indulge, we may speculate on multiple versions of the world-in-itself, yet we can never break free from epistemological constraints. Knowledge dwells within language, yet cognition precedes language. Hence we attempt to regress to a pre-infantile state. Even if this act of seeing should fail, it grants us a flawed mode of self-affirmation in the AI age. In this age of pervasive anxiety, let us make landfall together upon the star.