QIN Ni: The Polarized Chronicle: Curated by GAO Yumeng

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to present The Polarized Chronicle, a solo exhibition by QIN Ni, on view from September 13 to October 12, 2025. The exhibition features more than twenty panel paintings created since 2022.

“Polarization” refers to the process by which diffuse, chaotic natural light is disciplined through a filter into light vibrating in a single, ordered direction. QIN Ni has internalized this principle as an operative logic. She subjects the dispersive and contingent materials of memory, history, and quotidian imagery to a coding system of her own invention—appropriated and fictively extended from the Dewey Decimal Classification—through which they are selected, recomposed, and inscribed. In this way she constructs a personal ethics of seeing and a narrative strategy, allowing the submerged stories obscured by surface orders to reappear within her works.

“My entire practice is about building a secret passage filled with lies between two seemingly opposed forms: ‘story’ (histoire) and ‘History’ (Histoire).” — QIN Ni

QIN Ni’s artistic genealogy can be traced to a distinctly Foucauldian point of departure: a suspicion toward classificatory systems of knowledge and an interrogation of their limits. Foucault himself famously began his archaeology of Western epistemes upon reading Borges’s citation of a fictive “Chinese encyclopedia,” where animals are taxonomized into categories such as “belonging to the emperor,” “smeared with camphor,” or “resembling flies from afar.” What elicited his laughter was the sudden collapse of epistemic ground—the destabilization of the “common place” of thought. From this rupture Foucault discerned a truth: that no classificatory system is neutral, but always serves a latent worldview and structure of power.

QIN Ni’s practice unfolds as a self-reflexive and parodic “archaeology of knowledge.” In Foucauldian terms, “natural light” corresponds to the diffuse field of countless statements (énoncés) that circulate in history and society: unorganized, scattered, vibrating in all directions. This is the pre-archival state, the raw matter of discourse—charged with potentiality, but saturated with noise. As Foucault insists, a statement is not a sentence or proposition but a function: it may appear as a painting, a map, a formula, or an architectural fragment. Its significance lies not in what it “expresses” but in how it functions within a discursive system.

It is in precisely this sense that QIN Ni constructs her personal system. The library classification epitomizes humanity’s rational ambition to compress the infinite and chaotic world into a finite, ordered framework of knowledge. By appropriating the most authoritative of such tools—the Dewey Decimal Classification—and continually forging within it, she transforms it into a pseudo-taxonomic grammar. If “natural light” is the unbounded multiplicity of statements, then in her work “polarized light” designates the ordered set of statements filtered through this fictive Deweyan lens and subsumed into her personal archive.

This archive interlaces genuine indexical entries with codes of her own invention. Her paintings thus become sites where “relations” and “rules” take form. They do not depict meaning perse, but reveal the processes by which things are named, classified, misread, and ultimately sedimented into memory. In this new series, she abandons narrative scenes in favor of inscribing statements directly: arranging images as one might arrange textual entries. Each work is no longer a discrete image but a statement—its significance inheres less in isolated content than in its function within the system and its resonances with other statements.

The work “533.022” Gas Mechanics – Initial Model may serve as an entry point into QIN Ni’s method. At the center of the panel, a crystalline polyhedron of interlocking triangles appears as stable as sacred geometry. Yet what animates this “world model” is not law or reason but absurd life-forces: tiny monkeys encircling its edges exhale clouds that form the raw material of inner landscapes; three airborne figures—half wind-god, half angel—propel the structure by comically flatulent means; among the circling flock of doves, two black crows are discreetly inserted, injecting discord into apparent harmony. This cosmological schema is thus rendered paradoxical: precise in appearance, absurd in substance, exposing “world origin” itself as a personal mythology laced with lies.

If “533.022” parodically fabricates a cosmic origin, then “305.409” Unproofed interrogates the discursive power behind historical origin myths. At its center, a solitary rib is enshrined in a transparent vitrine-like rectangle, evoking a fossil on display. The symbol points directly to the Biblical narrative of Eve fashioned from Adam’s rib—the foundational myth of woman’s “secondary” status within Western civilization. Qin Ni extracts the rib from its originary context and suspends it within a deep black firmament, transfiguring it into a “historical specimen” awaiting re-examination.

In the lower corner, a diminutive monkey exhales black smoke that ascends to envelop the rib. The whispers of the individual generate a cosmic backdrop of history, which in turn frames the evidence of origin. Women’s history, the work suggests, resembles a text “without proofreading”—constructed and overwritten by grand narratives, yet always retaining the potential for re-reading and revision.

In this way, QIN Ni exceeds the gesture of deconstruction, committing herself instead to a constructive fiction. She re-codes history through her personal taxonomy, yet remains acutely aware of the provisional and open-ended condition of all narratives. She refuses the role of “master-builder,” positioning herself instead as a humble observer who deliberately suspends closure: on one side rigorously establishing frameworks, on the other leaving fissures through which uncontrollable and unclassifiable traces of nature—such as the raw grain of wood—assert themselves as sovereign presences.

This cognitive stance ultimately crystallizes into a deeply physical gesture: carving with a knife. It is at once a material trace within the painting and, more profoundly, an act of active unconcealment against order and appearance. Through the intervention of the blade, the wood grain—that which was "concealed" by pigment and symbol—is forcefully re-exposed, becoming a persistent mockery and a reminder against any systematic construction.

The exhibition’s eponymous work, “521.11” Polarization Notes, again crystallizes this stance. Across a vast wooden panel resembling desert terrain or stellar dust, the logic of sheep migration is displaced. Tiny flocks, scattered stones, drifting tumbleweeds, and the nebula-like trajectories of natural wood grain converge into what Foucault termed a “heterotopia”—a heterogeneous space compressing infinite temporalities into a single field. Here, vegetal cycles, animal migrations, and geological permanence are juxtaposed; yet every human ordering of movement ultimately returns to the primordial substrate of wood grain to be inscribed.

The grain itself functions as the background noise of the cosmos: pre-linguistic, resistant to codification, an ocean of meaning that encompasses all. It silently bears the games of order and classification, and through its ungovernable flow, reminds us of the limits and transience of all human systems.