Comunicato stampa | Press release

Matèria is pleased to announce the opening of Spoken Leaves, Chen Xiaoyi's second solo exhibition at the gallery. With her long-awaited return to Rome, the artist presents a new body of work that highlights her pronounced inclination towards multidisciplinarity developed in recent years, evidenced by the fusion of photography, publishing, sculpture, video, and experimental printing techniques.

 The title Spoken Leaves draws inspiration from a dialogue between Martin Heidegger and Tezuka Tomio (a professor of German literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo), in which the two, to explore the subtle evocative nuances of language and its essence, delve into the concept of "Koto ba," a Japanese term meaning "word/language" but also known as the "Garden of Words." This definition, with its deep metaphorical character, plays a key role in Chen's research, inviting viewers to navigate existential dimensions beyond mere verbal communication.

 Spoken Leaves thus emerges as a bridge, fluidly connecting the ordinary with the profound traces of nature and human consciousness; a metaphorical boundary formally rendered by the monumentality of the Hengduan Mountains in China, a place that has characterized the artist's last four years of life, fostering and inspiring the visual translation of the transient essence of natural phenomena.

 In Chen Xiaoyi's imagination, the landscape is redrawn along the coordinates of transcendence, seeking an ancestral vitality that fuels a new dynamic perspective, surpassing the boundaries of human temporality; a tool to navigate a contemporary landscape fraught with difficulty and uncertainty.

 Imbued with a sense of temporal depth, Chen Xiaoyi's works anchor the experience of life to indeterminate horizons, blurring the line between the tangible and the transcendent, seeking magical elements in everyday experience.

 Spoken Leaves is a testament to Chen's bold attempt to capture the essence of existence itself.