Painting here is regarded as a slow drifting. It is in no hurry to arrive; instead, it extends like an echo suspended in the air, like an invisible eddy on the surface of water. Colour, form and texture permeate one another in their flow, softening boundaries and leaving the act of looking without a fixed point of reliance. The “softening” referred to in the title of the exhibition does not imply a blunting of edges; rather, it is a current of energy that moves at the point of encounter – light, time and emotion endlessly intersect, crease and spill across the canvas, pushing back those once sharp contours, dissolving them into a state of suspension.

This “softening” responds to the sensitivity to light and atmosphere in Western modernist painting since Monet, and to a certain extent carries forward the traces of gesture and chance found in Abstract Expressionism. Yet it does not remain confined to a Western context. In the work of Jonathan Miles and Xu Chenxi one can also perceive the characteristic liubai (the charged use of blank space) and flowing spirit of East Asian painting – that approach inherited from ancient landscapes, in which time and breath are drawn into the canvas, making the image both light and inwardly tense. Within this cross-cultural confluence, the visual philosophies of East and West are folded back into one another: the painterly intensity of the West here ceases to be a matter of forceful gesture and is tempered by an Eastern stillness; while the ethereality of the East, within the language of contemporary painting, is newly endowed with a tactile, sensorial weight.

Jonathan Miles leaves the rhythm of gesture inscribed upon the surface: fractured lines, abrupt fields of colour, and sweeping, turning, retracting traces of the brush. He allows the image to hover between control and release, entering collision, and retreating. In certain areas, bright colour tightens like a drawn string, while the empty expanses elsewhere convey a slow, intangible dispersal. This exhibition focuses on two of Jonathan Miles’ series, 1000 Paintings and Lily O. One addresses his identity as an artist in its exploration of “the image of painting” rather than “the painting of an image”, while the other reflects his simultaneous role as a writer, nesting the structures of fictional narrative within the work. Through these overlapping identities and spaces, time slips away from its prescribed trajectory, circling between the real and the imagined.

By contrast, Xu Chenxi’s paintings resemble silent messengers from space, often beginning with the lightest sensations—a faint brushstroke or a subtle wash of color, like a breath drifting from afar that slowly diffuses across the canvas. In her work, shared human emotions are translated into compositions of color, rhythm, and resonance. Rather than seeking a clear center, her creative process allows each pause and overlap to become part of color’s own emergence.This exhibition presents her new works from 2022 to 2025. Her large-scale pieces unfold with a flowing and unhurried gesture, echoing the rhythms of breath and movement, while her smaller works are more concentrated, releasing heightened emotional intensity—like fragments of daily light distilled repeatedly in delicate glass vessels.Situated between steadiness and fluidity, inner contemplation and global experience, Her practice leans toward a mode of “non-linear time” in painting. Time here is not a linear narrative, but a layered construction of color fields and translucent strokes—a resting place for perception that invites the viewer into a near-meditative state of looking.

As these two rhythms draw close to one another within the gallery, an unexpected resonance emerges. Their colours, like a recovered sense of touch, are tender yet tinged with a wandering uncertainty, unbound by objects and unanchored by meaning. The airy breath of Xu Chenxi’s paintings and the more solemn, enduring silence of Jonathan Miles’ canvases form in the space a double suspension. They appear to come from different directions, yet together they transform past artistic experience into new forms of flow, converging before the viewer as a tidal surge of history.