Bringing together an impressive array of 19 works spanning installation, sound and video, sculpture, and painting, the exhibition Conceptual Erasure explores varied approaches to contemporary practice across generations and disciplines. The participating artists included Beiyi Wang, Chaoming Zheng, Derek Miller, Henryk Terpilowski, Iris Jingyi Zeng, Jiaqi Liao, Jialin Wu, Jing Zhou, Jingyun Guan, Jun Rui Lo, Lin (Ruki) Li, Lingfei Shen, Mengzhu Li, Mo Cheng, Purva Kundaje, Sofia Sanchez, Xinyue Gao, Zesheng Li, Ziyan Zhang.
Unfolding across two floors, the exhibition takes its theoretical grounding from phenomenological reduction and post-conceptual artistic discourse. The curatorial framework examines the productive potential of conceptual suspension (epoché), underscoring the hermeneutic and perceptual negotiations inherent in the artists’ practices.
Conceptual Erasure represents a significant exploration of how contemporary artists work beyond traditional conceptual frameworks, challenging how we see and understand the world and opening a dialogue about unmediated experience in art. Through works in various media, audiences are invited to encounter art freed from predetermined readings, privileging immediate, felt response over critical analysis. The spatial arrangement throughout the exhibition encourages direct engagement with individual works while creating meaningful juxtapositions, enriching the audience’s experience and emphasising a commitment to facilitating pre-linguistic encounters with contemporary artistic practice.
Jun Rui Lo, recently shortlisted for New Contemporaries, presents Untitled (11) (2025), a work that exemplifies this approach by transforming wooden chair parts into an enigmatic horn-like sculpture suspended above eye level. The piece strips away familiar references to create a work that resists immediate categorisation, forcing viewers into a space of uncertainty where meaning must be encountered rather than decoded.
Where Lo strips away material familiarity through transformation, Henryk Terpilowski uncovers it through chance encounter. Cooking time 1hr 43mins (2025) emerged from manipulating a found child’s doll until it resembled a raw supermarket chicken. The work asks nothing and explains nothing, yet confronts viewers with an unsettling metamorphosis that operates below rational interpretation.
While Lo and Henryk’s works interrogate material form through direct physical distortion, Iris Jingyi Zeng extends this inquiry into the psychological and perceptual realms. Aquarium (2022) presents a twin-screen video installation where external gaze and internal currents occupy separate screens, while a fishbone sits suspended within a tank, simultaneously shelter and barrier. As waves crash against the glass, the work creates an unstable boundary between exposure and concealment, embodying the artist’s concern with states that resist fixed definition.
In dissolving the boundaries between concept and experience, Conceptual Erasure creates a space for art to exist on its own terms—unmediated, immediate, and irreducibly present. This is art that emerges from touch, instinct, and material encounter rather than intellectual design.
From May 27th to June 2nd, 2025, the gallery at 56 Dawes Road in London hosted Conceptual Erasure, a contemporary art exhibition curated by ArtOrb and organized by Tablab.
