THE
SHAPE
IS A MOMENT
形瞬
Artist
艺术家
Ni Zhiqi
倪志琪
Sook Jin JO
赵婌真
Yuan Kan
袁侃
Gao Ruyun
高入云
Wu Muhan
吴牧寒
Commented by Ben Xia Tian
特邀评论：夏天
Period 时间
12 Sep – 27 Dec, 2026
Venue 地点
上海市黄浦区虎丘路27号 2F07
2F07, No.27 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai
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YANG Gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition The Shape Is a Moment, on view from September 12 to December 27, 2026. The exhibition brings together paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and installations by Ni Zhiqi, Sook Jin Jo, Yuan Kan, Gao Ruyun, and Wu Muhan.
The exhibition takes its title from a line by American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner George Oppen: “The shape is a moment.” For Oppen, one is continually moving between reading and rereading, and form emerges in the interval created by this movement. It is neither a permanently fixed contour nor a static fragment severed from time. More often, it is the moment when dispersed perceptions suddenly acquire order: the eye apprehends a particular relationship within the world, and form appears; as the gaze continues to shift, that relationship opens onto further possibilities. The Shape Is a Moment brings form and temporality into close relation within the exhibition space, revealing the moments in which form comes into order.
Within the aesthetic context of modernism, form gradually shifted from being understood as the inherent appearance of an object to a way in which perception organizes the world. We never possess an object in its entirety through a single act of looking. Instead, it reveals itself progressively through its different sides, distances, lighting conditions, movements, and surroundings. The form apprehended by the gaze is the provisional order produced by these conditions at a particular moment. It possesses a certain clarity while also carrying within it those aspects that have yet to appear.
Seeing is constituted through the body’s movement into the world. The position of the eye, the movement of the body, the object’s call for attention, and changes in the surrounding space all participate in the formation of the visible. Every present moment also bears traces of what has just passed and anticipations of what is yet to come. The Shape Is a Moment, therefore, does not point to the transience of form, but to the idea that form can only arise through successive, concrete encounters. The works in this exhibition continually capture the forms generated through such encounters, prompting viewers to reconsider and revise the judgments they have already formed.
Commented by Ben Xia Tian
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Ni Zhiqi 倪志琪
Ni Zhiqi, born in Shanghai, China in 1957, pursued further studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium in the 1990s, where he was awarded First Prize at the Karel Veslat exhibition. He currently lives and works in Shanghai.
Ni Zhiqi’s recent colour-field works are primarily associated with his Vacuum series, alongside mixed-media works such as World Theatre. The Vacuum series represents an important stage in the development of his artistic practice, marking his gradual transition from figurative representation toward a purer form of abstraction. Characterised by expansive fields of colour, simplified geometric structures, soft boundaries and richly layered surface textures, the works appear minimal at first glance. Yet rather than embodying the cool abstraction of Western modernism, they continue the artist’s longstanding exploration of memory, time and perception.
The chair is also a recurring and significant motif throughout Ni Zhiqi’s practice. In his works, the chair is more than an everyday object; it becomes a medium between the individual and space, presence and absence. An empty chair suggests someone who was once there—or someone yet to arrive—while carrying traces of time, memory and lived experience. Through repeatedly depicting and reinterpreting this familiar object, Ni gradually transforms it beyond its functional identity into a visual symbol of waiting, solitude, memory and the state of existence.
Vacuum & World
30 x 30cm x 24pieces
Mixed Media
Vacuum
130 x 130cm
Mixed Media
Vacuum Chair
130 x 80 x 45cm / 80 x 45 x 40cm
Mixed Media
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Jook Jin JO 赵婌真
Born in South Korea and currently based in New York, Sook Jin Jo is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses drawing, collage, photography, assemblage sculpture, performance, installation, public art, and architectural design.
Jo established her artistic career by creating sculptures from reclaimed materials. More precisely, she collects materials on site and then returns them to their original locations, transforming them into sculptural installations. She has a remarkable ability to uncover distinctive qualities in found objects, and her assemblages give new life to both the materials and their surroundings. Across her extensive body of sculptures, installations, and site-specific works—often using transformed abandoned spaces as their setting—she reveals that creation does not necessarily involve making something entirely new, but rather reconfiguring what already exists and giving it a second life through a new context.
Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, California; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; the Seoul Museum of Art; the Erie Art Museum in Pennsylvania; and the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami.
Narrow is the Way III
35 x 61 x 8cm
Oil and Mixed Media on Wood
The Reason the Desert is Beautiful is Because a Well is Hidden Somewhere
36.5 × 51 × 4.3 cm
Oil and Mixed Media on Wood
Shanghai Black Series
54 x 59cm
Mixed Media on Paper
Shanghai Black Series
41 x 56cm
Mixed Media on Paper
Shanghai Black Series
52 x 64cm
Mixed Media on Paper
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Yuan Kan 袁侃
Born in Shanghai in 1971, Yuan Kan is a Chinese contemporary artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, mixed-media installation, and other forms. Moving between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional, as well as the figurative and the abstract, he combines diverse media and materials to forge a distinctive artistic trajectory.
Yuan’s work is characterized by a highly individual approach to both visual expression and conceptual inquiry. He emphasizes uncertainty and mystery in art, as well as the importance of preserving spaces that resist communication at the margins of an age of information overload—spaces capable of offering refuge for the inner self. In his abstract works, recognizable images have largely disappeared or receded from view, giving way to powerful abstract metal sculptures.
As a contemporary artist and experimental practitioner, Yuan engages with the historical development of Chinese contemporary art while continually expanding the boundaries of expression through new forms and an abstract visual language. His work is often interpreted as a mode of personal narrative and spiritual inquiry within the context of contemporary China. Emotion and personal experience provide the driving force behind his practice; an abstract yet expressive language serves as its vehicle; and the construction of an inner space remains its ultimate destination.
Couple
350 × 96 × 140 cm / 300 × 76 × 130 cm
Stainless Steel
Sages of Antiquity No. 1
175 x 110cm
Pastel on Paper
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Gao Ruyun 高入云
Gao Ruyun, born in Shanghai in 1988, is a contemporary Chinese artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans installation, painting, photography and site-specific works. At its core is an ongoing investigation into the relationships between consciousness, perception, time, space and movement.
The line is the most distinctive element in Gao’s visual language and a recurring thread throughout his practice. Working with rope, fishing line, metal, acrylic and mechanical systems, he turns lines into carriers of movement, tension and rhythm. At times they follow precisely calculated trajectories; at others they deviate from a predetermined order under the influence of gravity, tension and chance. The works hold a subtle, continuous equilibrium between order and randomness, stability and transformation.
This is most evident in his LOOP and Awareness series. In LOOP, moving lines circulate, intersect, approach and separate within carefully constructed structures, their repetitive mechanical rhythms continually altering the viewer’s sense of space and time. In Awareness, lines are stretched, suspended and balanced between multiple forces, giving an almost tangible form to otherwise invisible tensions.
Loop Loop f
42 × 57 × 11 cm
Acrylic, Stainless Steel, Motor, Nylon Rope
Awareness 77
150 x 110cm
Acrylic & Ink on canvas
Awareness 78
150 x 110cm
Acrylic & Ink on canvas
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Wu Muhan 吴牧寒
Wu Muhan B.1997, Quzhou Zhejiang. Now lives and works in Shanghai.
Wu Muhan’s artistic practice focuses on the dialectical relationship between creation and production, constructing a contemporary monument to material production through the selective reconfiguration of industrial products and everyday objects. The artist adopts a philosophical perspective, viewing interrelationships as the logical prerequisite for the construction of the objective world. His installation works often use discarded and obsolete found objects as carriers, blending materials with cold textures, fragile characteristics, and potential dangers to highlight the profound traces left by consciousness in the material world. In terms of creative methodology, Wu Muhan adopts a method similar to building with blocks, exploring the possibilities of meaning generation through the displacement, stacking, and deconstruction of objects, navigating between the predetermined and the accidental. The material elements in the works establish temporary connections based on their inherent structural characteristics.
In his creative methodology, Wu Muhan adopts an approach akin to building with blocks, exploring the possibilities for the emergence of meaning between the predetermined and the accidental through processes of displacement, stacking, and deconstruction. The material elements in his works form provisional connections based primarily on their inherent structural properties. These ephemeral and readily dismantled configurations reflect the artist’s profound reconsideration and questioning of the traditional sculptural notion of permanence.
The Heart of the Stable
60 x 35 x 40cm
IKEA Bracket, Metal Saddle, Leather Water Bucket, Horse Toy
Feel Alive
64 x 23 x 26cm
Iron, Gold, Chastity Locks, Plastic
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