Aleph: Artist: Wenjie Yu

 

 

Nan Ke Gallery is pleased to present Wenjie Yu's solo exhibition “Aleph” on September 25th at the Aurora Art Museum in Shanghai.

 

Exhibition Title Aleph Takes Its Name from Jorge Luis Borges’s Eponymous Device – a luminous sphere barely two or three centimetres in diameter, yet containing all of time, all places, and all things in the universe, presented from every angle simultaneously. Yu Wenjie has no intention of replicating this omniscient promise. What concerns him is the real state of memory: we cannot retain “everything” with our minds; all we have are the light of a certain afternoon, the tone of a certain sentence, the curve of a shoulder as someone turns away. As the curator puts it, the artist is not interested in “historical archives or dates on an ID card, but in what you cannot forget yet have never truly remembered – those things you thought you no longer cared about, yet which always return to you at the most unexpected moments.

 

Wenjie Yu

Into which I was turned #1 , 2026

Cotton cloth, linen, cotton sewing thread, soft pastel, resin and wood paint
137h x 100w cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

The exhibition is structured around seven days, extending from the first to the seventh and spiralling back to the beginning – each return carrying all the experience accumulated along the way. This structure echoes Husserl’s concept of “retention”: every present perception bears the trace of what has just passed; these traces continually recede and attenuate, yet never truly disappear, constituting a dynamic, persistent “halo.” Yu Wenjie translates this philosophical insight into a spatial narrative, allowing viewers to experience the sedimentation and overflow of memory over the course of seven days.

 

Wenjie Yu 

Inner stirring, 2026

Cotton cloth, linen, elastic fabric, cotton sewing thread, sand, soft pastel, resin and wood paint
128h x 286w cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

The central image running through the seven days is a butterfly. Fabric is cut and resewn, red threads repeatedly pierce the surface, and the butterfly emerges from the rupture – the old order disintegrates, and a new structure grows from the fissure. Butterflies scatter across the gaps between different materials, as if the same perception migrates and takes form across various media. The artist has described his working logic as follows: “Two completely different cocoons are forcibly stitched together, and yet they can still give birth to a butterfly.” This paradoxical logic of generation permeates the entire exhibition: memory is not a smooth repository, but a product of dislocation, overlap, and deformation. Each return overflows itself, producing residues that cannot be absorbed by existing frameworks. And it is precisely these residues that allow feeling to survive in time.

 

Wenjie Yu

Amulet, 2026

Cotton cloth, linen, cotton sewing thread, soft pastel, resin, stump and wood paint
65h x 24w x 24d cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

The exhibition also draws on the phenomenological concept of “adumbration”: anything can only be approached through finite profiles, never fully presented. Yu Wenjie uses fibres, pigments, threads, and sound to construct partial, local, perpetually incomplete “viewpoints.” Standing before the works, viewers cannot obtain a definitive answer, yet between their own memories and the materiality of the works, a personal resonance is triggered. This resonance, for the artist, is more essential than the event itself – events are contingent, feelings are essential. He therefore strips away specific events, leaving only temperature, weight, rhythm, and density, to narrate a perception that leans towards collective consciousness.

 

The works in the exhibition span painting, sculpture, installation, video, embroidery, and sound. Yu Wenjie performs a secondary suture according to a logic of sensation, transforming illusions, memories, associations, and emotions into visible fragments.

 

Wenjie Yu

I don't know where eternity grows #2, 2026

Cotton cloth, linen, cotton sewing thread, sand, eternal rose, needle, wood, soft pastel, resin, and wood paint
50h x 60w cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

 The central work I Do Not Know Where Eternity Lies presents a highly charged scene: love letters sink into stone stelae, hand-stitched characters emerge from the fabric, the threads are left unknotted, each thread connected to a needle, and the needle tips pierce the buds of preserved roses. The solidity of the stele does not bear memory – it bears the very fact that memory cannot be borne. The readability of the text is suspended, the act of sending the letters is cancelled, and the wilting of the roses is blocked by eternal flowers – each layer of negation points to the same truth: genuine expression occurs at the site of transmission’s failure. Derrida once argued that writing is more honest than speech, because once meaning is written down it no longer belongs to the author’s control, shifting continually across different times and contexts. Yu Wenjie’s needle and thread transform this abstract slippage into a tangible, palpable physical fact: every time the needle point passes through the fabric, it leaves an irretrievable hole, allowing something unspeakable to reveal itself quietly.

 

Wenjie Yu

When all things pass through another turn, 2026

Cotton cloth, linen, cotton sewing thread, soft pastel, resin and wood paint
Total: 80h x 120w x 140d cm
Big House: 64h x 42w x 42d cm
Small House: 46h x 31w x 31d cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

An opposing state appears in the numerous works featuring “loose threads.” The needle passes through the fabric without being tied off, and the thread ends hang from the surface – both connected and broken. They appear unfinished, yet the artist deliberately leaves them as they are – a refusal of the notion of “completion,” and a depiction of memory’s authentic condition: the fragments you think need to be pieced together do not actually need to be sutured back into a whole; existing as fragments is even closer to truth than wholeness.

 

The new experimental series Sow consists of wooden boxes covered with translucent fabric, inside which scattered balls of wool lie loose. Viewers cannot fully see what is inside, only vaguely perceiving those curled yarn balls – like seeds, yet one cannot know what flowers will bloom. The translucent surface prevents anything from being completely clear; dislocation takes root here. The softness, colours, and curls of the wool balls are material facts, but they tell no story; you can never deduce their history from their material state. Those wool balls might once have belonged to a sweater from fifty years ago, or they might never have been worn at all – meaning falls into the gaps, onto coordinates where nothing ever happened. The covering fabric symbolises the true face of memory as “that which cannot be fully seen”: it is not a defect of memory, but its most honest appearance. What we ultimately possess are merely interpretations of the past – those refined, displaced, proliferating layers of overlay, rather than the past itself.

 

Wenjie Yu

Sow #1, 2026

Velvet fabric, silk, cotton sewing thread, wool, yarn balls, wooden board and wood paint
33h x 40w cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

Throughout the exhibition, Yu Wenjie repeatedly poses the same question across different material mediums: when language reaches its limits, when narrative cannot cover feeling, how else can we make the unsayable present? His answer lies in silent stitches, unknotted thread ends, translucent coverings – they offer no solutions, but mark all the positions where meaning once attempted to arrive.

 

Test by Zirui Zhuang