Kexin ZHANG: In the Name of Love: Curated by Rabbi WANG

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to present In the Name of Love, a solo project by artist Kexin ZHANG, opening on April 11, 2026. Conceived as a new body of work centered on the myth of Narcissus, the exhibition unfolds in four acts and brings together around twenty works from his Narcissus series, staging a psychological drama that moves from self-enchantment toward self-destruction. Continuing his use of Gongbi painting on silk, mineral pigments, antique frames, and layered symbolic systems, Kexin interweaves the narrative archetype of classical Western myth with his sustained inquiry into human nature, the dynamics of desire, and psychic experience. In doing so, Narcissus becomes more than an ancient fable about Narcissus; it is transformed into a contemporary narrative of cognitive disturbance and inner crisis. Curated by Rabbi Wang, the exhibition will last till May 9, 2026.

Across Kexin’s recent practice, whether in his earlier explorations of good and evil, desire and the conflicts embedded within human nature, or in his bringing together of Eastern and Western cultural metaphors, one question remains central: how does one understand the relationship between the self and the inner mind under the pull of desire? Narcissus is a perfect figure approaching to this question. Gazing at the beautiful reflection in the water, he believes he has fallen in love with a perfect beloved, when in fact he has been captured by his own projection. This misrecognition deprives love of its usual objecthood, turning desire into a closed and self-referential loop. Love here does not lead toward genuine encounter, but toward an image that may be approached endlessly and never attained. For this reason, Narcissus is not simply an account of self-fascination. At a deeper level, it reveals a crisis of subjectivity itself: when one seeks confirmation of the self from outside, what one often encounters is merely the echo of desire, the projection of consciousness, and the emptiness magnified by one’s own gaze. The enduring force of the Narcissus myth lies precisely in the fact that it touches one of desire’s most paradoxical structures: we do not always love what is real and attainable, but often the fantasy, idealization, and the sense of absence that an object comes to embody. Pleasure and pain, fulfillment and deprivation, infatuation and shame therefore cease to oppose one another; instead, they coexist within the same experience.

"The annual rings of the wooden outer frame are subtle and enigmatic, like echoes of the vast cosmos: at times radiant as stars beneath a bright moon; at times flowing like ripples, lightly brushing the wounds of the soul; and at times like emotional black holes, absorbing every remnant of tenderness. The antique inner frames, by contrast, shimmer with a cold metallic luster, bringing with them an almost piercing clarity of mind; white appears immaculate, yet conceals a violence akin to slaughter; splendor verges on decay; and brilliant gold settles into an almost eternal, ornate sorrow. It is as though an encounter across time has condensed the inner strain of the self into a small field of vision charged with desire and voyeurism." 

—Kexin

Act I: Awakening

The story begins with an almost fated encounter. The water’s surface becomes both mirror and fissure, allowing the subject to encounter a figure at once familiar and strange for the first time, awakening desire, self-love, and the first stirrings of inner division. In this first act, love does not appear as a luminous beginning, but as a cold sensation, a soul released into the night. From that moment onward, the image that is seen and an unknown force of attraction awaken together. Once the shadow is granted the possibility of love, the tragedy has already taken root in the water.

Act II: Blossoming

As desire awakens, the subject moves ever closer to the reflection in the water, pouring into its adoration, pleasure, and consolation as though the longed-for object were within reach. Gazing upon that watery image, infatuation, happiness, and sorrow bloom in the same instant, as if the nearer one comes to the beloved, the closer one draws to an illusion that can never be touched. The flower blossoms. This is a luxuriance driven to its furthest extreme by desire; it is fantasy in full bloom. The more sumptuous it becomes, the more unreal it appears, and the more clearly it foretells its own inevitable fading.

Act III: Sinking

When the gaze has lingered so long that the boundary between shore and water is forgotten, the love is no longer love. The subject begins to sink slowly beneath the combined weight of desire, resentment, and inner tearing. The will to withdraw appears again and again, yet never truly succeeds in severing the bond to that phantom image; the pain of refusal and the impulse toward destruction coil around one another, like a body descending ever deeper into its own reflection. Departure becomes only another form of return, and lucidity is immediately swallowed by a more tenacious fixation. Narcissus’s suffering becomes more absolute than ordinary love precisely because what he cannot possess has, from the beginning, been only himself.

Act IV: Withering

At last, the illusion can no longer sustain its beauty, and the subject comes to recognize the truth of the tragedy in the midst of decline. The perfect beloved, so close at hand, has been nothing more than his own reflection. After splendor and excess comes an extraordinary restraint, as though all violent emotion were gradually emptied out before the arrival of death, leaving only shame, self-pity, awakening, and stillness. The falling does not signify a simple ending, but a transformation in the mode of being itself. The end of the self brings death; the body returns to silence; feeling sheds its outward intensity, until only that final sorrow remains, un-evaporated, slowly merging with the lake.

What the Narcissus series presents is precisely this capricious and almost pathological beauty: the subject is immersed in momentary pleasure even as he slips into anxiety, dependency, revulsion, and destruction within a relation that can neither be fulfilled nor redeemed. Through the lens of modern psychology, this condition resonates with the narcissistic fixation on an ideal self-image, while also suggesting the psychic fracture produced by disordered identification, projection, and unstable attachment. In the end, when desire loses the other and finds only the self-turning endlessly back upon itself, the most exquisite gaze is transformed into the deepest fall. It is in that fall that the narcissus flower acquires its cruel and seductive power as a symbol.