Chengtao YI: Apparently: Curated by WANG Yaoli

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce Apparently, a solo project by artist Chengtao YI, running from August 29 to September 18, 2026. Curated by WANG Yaoli, the project takes the gallery’s window space as its site, developing a spatial experiment around the act of “seeing.” Beginning with the camouflage mechanism of the chameleon, YI transforms the surface of the body—originally used to conceal itself—into an immersive environment. In doing so, the project considers the shifting relationships between the viewing subject, images, and reality at a moment when images are increasingly read, recognized, and processed by machines.

Chameleons respond to their surroundings by altering the colors and patterns of their bodies, a process commonly understood as camouflage: as the body converges with its background, the subject becomes part of the environment. In this project, YI reverses this relationship. He extracts close-up images of chameleon scales, enlarging, printing, and repeatedly extending them across the space so that a surface once attached to the body is released from its original scale and expanded into a new environment. Six images of potted plants are placed within this setting. The chameleon no longer appears as a complete subject, while the plants shift from their conventional position as part of a natural background to become objects embedded within an image-based environment.

This reversal of visual relations corresponds to YI’s observations on the contemporary image environment. Images were once understood primarily as objects made for human viewing, serving to document, represent, and transmit reality. With the development of machine vision, algorithmic recognition, and artificial intelligence, however, the generation, reading, classification, and circulation of images are no longer entirely oriented toward human perception. Images can now be recognized and processed across different technological systems, participating in forms of judgment as data and probabilities. As a result, the human viewer no longer necessarily occupies the center of the visual relationship, while images themselves have increasingly become part of the way technological systems perceive and organize reality. Apparently does not attempt to directly represent how machines see. Instead, it translates this transformation in the conditions of viewing into a spatial question of scale, position, and recognition. By enlarging fragments of chameleon scales and extending them into an environment, YI allows what was originally an object of vision to begin determining the conditions under which vision takes place. At the same time, the plants are no longer simply objects to be viewed, but become presences that must be identified anew within an image environment.

The project continues YI’s ongoing engagement with technology, vision, and the mechanisms of perception. Rather than treating seeing as a passive act of perception, he considers how culture, media, and technological systems collectively shape the ways in which reality becomes legible to us. In Apparently, he extends this inquiry further: when we believe that we are “seeing” something, what determines the particular way in which it becomes visible? And as images become increasingly embedded in the recognition, classification, and interpretation of reality, do the viewing subject and the object being viewed still occupy the positions they once did?

The Chinese and English titles of the project, “显然” and Apparently, also produce distinct yet overlapping meanings. In Chinese, “显然” generally suggests something clear, definite, or even self-evident; the English word apparently, by contrast, also carries the implication of “seemingly” or “as it appears to be.” Certainty and uncertainty therefore coexist within the title, mirroring the visual relationship established by the work: the plants remain real plants, and the scales do indeed come from a chameleon, yet once their positions, scales, and relationships are reorganized, our distinctions between subject and background, image and reality, become rather less “apparent.”