Once Upon A Blue Moon: Curated by Aleza ZHENG
BONIAN SPACE presents ‘Once Upon A Blue Moon’, a group exhibition exploring the narrative potential of Chinoiserie as a voice for histories of bilateral trade and complexities of diasporic experience. The show imagines a novel realm between glaze and gaze, unfolding a coming-of-age story of a Qing dynasty porcelain vase as it journeys from East to the West. Six artists spanning generations examine the entanglements of cultural inheritance and personal memory through themes of transformation - in identity, medium, and time. The exhibition is curated by artist Aleza ZHENG.
A pretty porcelain vase with a full head of hair opens the show – I Woke Up Like This (2025) by Jennifer Ling Datchuk presents a paradigm shift: our narrative belongs not to the victor, but to a vessel.
In a nightmarish logic, the binaries of subject and object, dream and reality, blue and white unfurl across three paintings by Evelyn TAN. For the first chapter of becoming, the fragile contours of self and world have yet to be drawn. Tan renders the violent blows of formative rupture with the soft seduction of a reality untouched by understanding, expanding a cold cruelty that only children can wield. Dream Portal (2025) transports us to a stage of méconnaissance, as child glimpses itself in the mirror for the first time.
Flawless (2023) by Jennifer Ling Datchuk is a mirror that reflects all but the face: a reproduction of pastoral-toile on a white porcelain mask obscures the viewer’s reflection, questioning identity in a reproduction economy. Long dismissed as decorative, feminine, and superficial—a consumptive fantasy to be possessed - Chinoiserie, as historian Kristina Kleutghen notes, was “entangled with its feminization in the Western gaze.” Datchuk engages porcelain in its original form of soft power, giving voice to the vessel and reframing the medium within systems that have long sought to aestheticize, silence, or possess it.
When the vessel speaks, it speaks in tongues. Alex Anderson’s ceramics conjure spirits into sculpture, embodying our most charged emotional states. The works accumulate fractures, echoing a psychic rhythm of projection and reform. In Narcissistic Lemon with a Sour Audience (2023), a bright yellow lemon gazes into its watery reflection - forlorn, critical, yet unflinching. This body of work stages a refusal of social contracts: a will to remain suspended in our most volatile states, to relish in anxiety, contempt, desire and self-assertion.
Our vessel comes of crisis in Casus Belli (2025), an oil and silk painting by artist and curator Aleza ZHENG that visualizes the dream which inspired the exhibition. In this work, the vessel fractures from a singular form into a matrilineal lineage of ceramic typologies. Bada Shanren’s birds scream across ornamental flowers; a praying mother kneels beside a pubescent nymphet cradling a child. These figures seek refuge in a deteriorating Shanshui landscape. The title invokes the Latin phrase “cause of war”—a fabricated pretext that legitimizes violence beneath geopolitical ambitions.
From this moment of rupture, an airport carousel carries us into the final stage of the vase’s passage: a limbo—or more precisely, a neverending state of 游 (you)–wandering. Siyu CHEN’s Untitled (where shall I go: mist) (2024) unfolds as a meta-picture—at once painting, window, and stage. Referencing spatial illusions in Wu Hung’s The Double Screen, CHEN punctuates her work with personal motifs, weaving the visual logic of Chinese painting with Western signifiers. As we pass through her layered thresholds, we encounter somber reflections on dislocation and the quiet ache for belonging.
In the last stage of our protagonist’s life, we arrive at three still life drawings by Candice CHU. As if departing from the petty affairs of world, the final two flower vases are humble in shape, like an elder observing youth with subdued clairvoyance. The simplicity betray an introspection belonging to one who may have known too much. The show closes with 12:01 (2025) – two flowers simultaneously in bloom and decay–a gentle gesture to the cyclical turns of time, nature, and history.