Article | Dehua Hou: The Noise of the Flesh | Nan Ke Gallery-南柯画廊

In the exhibition The 120 Days of Sodom, Dehua Hou’s practice unfolds through a sustained mode of inward observation, addressing the instability of perception and the fragile conditions of existence itself. His painting is rooted in personal lived experience, shaped in particular by his condition as a Visual Snow Syndrome (VSS) patient, through which the world is apprehended in a distinctly altered visual register.

Installation view of 120 Days of Sodom, Jan. 10, 2026 - Mar. 8, 2026, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai, ©Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery, Photographed by Runxin.

For individuals with VSS, perception is persistently overlaid with dense, minute visual noise, resembling the constant flicker of a television screen without signal. This condition is understood to be linked not to the eyes but to cerebral perceptual mechanisms and, in many cases, to latent psychological trauma. For Hou, this “noise” functions as an entry point into the psychic realm. It intervenes directly in the emergence of images, becoming a constitutive element of his technical language and visual structure.

In terms of technique, Dehua Hou commonly generates these visual particles by flicking paint directly onto the canvas. This method—rooted in bodily movement and guided by a degree of chance—translates the artist’s internal thought processes and subtle tremors during the act of making into a physical surface that can be perceived directly.

Detail ｜ Face Unknown. Body the Same, 2025

Dehua Hou

Face Unknown, Body the Same，2025

Acrylic on dew retting flax

83h x 140w cm

©Courtesy of the artist

Within specific works, bodies appear in grey-white tones, intersecting and overlapping. In Soma Vessel (2023), the body resembles a hollowed shell: its materiality is weakened, while the presence of psychic force hovers between surface and interior. As the viewer’s perspective shifts, internal structures oscillate between revelation and disappearance. In Face Unknown, Body the Same (2025), this instability is pushed further into the register of corporeality itself. The boundaries of the body are continuously stretched and diffused, gradually dissolving, as if glimpses of an immeasurable divinity emerge from an otherwise familiar flesh.

Installation view of 120 Days of Sodom, Jan. 10, 2026 - Mar. 8, 2026, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai, ©Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery, Photographed by Runxin.

Hou deliberately incorporates foundational languages of 3D environments—such as “clipping” and “internal viewpoints”—as strategies for undermining the solidity of matter. Techniques originally designed to construct virtual realism instead point toward an unstable sense of reality within his work. The body becomes a structural unit reorganized without clear purpose or legibility, while order appears only temporarily, through ongoing drift and recomposition.

Within the context of The 120 Days of Sodom, where the body is repeatedly driven toward extremes and positioned as a carrier of desire and power, Hou’s work offers a path of inward reflection. Through the interweaving of visual noise, virtual space, and dematerialized bodies, his works sustain a cool, attentive mode of looking, returning questions of existence to the very origins of perception itself.