TANG Kexin: Mnemosyne’s Cabinet: Curated by WANG Yaoli
"It lingers there—perhaps where a nail once was, perhaps where countless imaginings begin." — TANG Kexin
BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the opening of Mnemosyne’s Cabinet, the first solo exhibition by artist TANG Kexin, running from August 29 to September 18, 2026. Curated by WANG Yaoli, the exhibition brings together nearly twenty new works spanning mineral pigments on silk and paper, acrylic on wood panel, and mixed media. The exhibition offers a focused presentation of TANG’s recent painting practice, which centers on objects, collecting, and personal experience.
TANG Kexin approaches the world through a mode of looking akin to that of a collector. Family keepsakes, everyday objects, and visual fragments drawn from museums, historical archives, and image-based sources constitute a recurring reservoir for her practice. Through sustained acts of depiction, translation, and recomposition, things once dispersed across different temporal and contextual registers are gradually absorbed into the artist’s own visual order. Painting, in this sense, becomes more than a means of representation: it offers another way of looking at things, forming relationships with them, and, ultimately, making them one’s own.
The exhibition title, Mnemosyne’s Cabinet, brings together two references: Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory in Greek mythology, and the Cabinet of Curiosities, an early form of private collecting in the Western tradition. The exhibition unfolds through two interwoven threads: public cataloguing and private value. On the one hand, objects enter a shared field of knowledge through systems of classification, naming, and display; on the other, they acquire singular meanings through personal memory, emotion, and embodied experience.
Across TANG’s works, silk, brass, gold and silver leaf, pearls, antique boxes, and other materials are brought into close conjunction, while boxes, cases, and cabinet-like structures recur as forms of containment and display. They offer objects a place in which to reside, while simultaneously bearing the traces of time. Mnemosyne’s Cabinet thus takes shape as a space suspended between public display and private keeping: things seen, remembered, and imagined encounter one another here, entering into renewed relationships with people through the act of looking.