“Wounds and Wings” is a group art exhibition presented at Lychee One, curated by Dongye Xu and Mudi Zhang, with Qiyang Yu as visual director.
Wounds and Wings explores the tension between conflict and healing, offering not definitive answers, but a shared space for reflection. In an age of uncertainty, it invites us to be present in each other’s gaze — a quiet yet powerful stance in the face of the unknown.
This exhibition features paintings, videos, and installations by eight outstanding artists.
Aura Sun’s works are ethereal and fluid, entangled with a dissociated spiritual world—at once dependent on and resistant to it. With gentle gestures, she absorbs pain and transforms it into energy.
Beiyi Wang’s installation is a living project—the process of a balloon being inflated echoes the buildup of collective tension. Its sudden burst mirrors how the writing of war history often awaits the dust to settle. For those caught in it, there is only the explosion. The fragments of maps scattered in the air symbolize the reordering of the world.
Guanhai Zhu’s Lilies carry the magic of time. From the moment he begins adding layer by layer, the work reminds us that all things eventually wither—and yet, lilies will always bloom again. Dog’s sharp and fragile materials are a tribute to a departed pet. His work invites us to see not just human individuals but also the animals who share our everyday lives.
Wu Lin’s installation uses interaction with the audience as a medium to flatten the source of pain—transforming it into a momentary, clear experience. Pain here requires no complex cause; it is reduced to a two-dimensional sensation directly linked to the instinct of life itself.
Xuesheng Ma’s work offers a gentle breath of warmth amid desolation. they used to bloom, made with delicate silk—a material chosen for its ephemeral, elusive quality—is inspired by a Zen Buddhist phrase and preserves the fleeting form of a flower in bloom. Echo, in contrast, uses a symbolic language to express a quiet, lingering longing for beauty once known.
Yu Hou’s prints, rendered with precision, infuse emotion into objects. Blurring the line between real and virtual, his work coldly examines how suffering and conflict erode both time and feeling. Yuwei Li’s grand narratives mark beginnings and ends. Fusing Eastern and Western aesthetics—combining ink-like blank space with layered oil techniques—her works frame the scabbing and seeping of historical wounds on the scale of planetary evolution.
Jiawen Zin Zhang’s documentary video focuses on the human alienated by suffering. It is one person’s story, but also the story of each of us—small as a grain of sand.
The exhibition focuses not only on large-scale conflicts but also on the most delicate emotions; it sees each individual within the crowd, while also sensing the abstract pain, warmth, and love that flow between them; it values inner intuition, and at the same time, protects every concrete and singular life.
At the opening of Wounds and Wings, we begin this journey with a duet between morin khuur artist Chaoyue Guan and pianist Tong Niu. This is not merely a musical performance, but a gesture of resonance and symbolism. Their collaboration embodies the intersection of wounds and wings: the morin khuur carries memories of migration and endurance across the grasslands, while the piano brings a sense of reason and poetic freedom. When they meet, sound becomes a bridge—crossing pain and connecting souls.
In this spirit, Wounds and Wings also served as a fundraising initiative for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), reflecting our hope that art can be a quiet yet persistent force of connection.
Within just one week after the exhibition closed, it successfully raised £510 for MSF, exceeding its initial £500 goal — a modest but meaningful gesture that embodies the spirit of giving at the heart of this project.
