Presented by Banana Stream Arts, at Yu Studio from 10th-17th July, 2025.
Curated by Chenqi Jiang, Jiaao Yin and assistant Curator Jingyao Jia.
Participating Artists: Annette Harvest, Caijing Kuang, Chenqi Jiang, Crude-Castin, Guo Cheng, Hui-Hsin Lu, Jingchen Han, Jingyao Jia, Lance Lin, Lingfei Shen, Louise Hapton, Mengzhu Li, Mingzhang Sun, Sebastian Alabaster, Weiyi Chen, Yulai Xu, Yuze Yuan, Yeer Zhang, Zhaoyang Chen, Ziyang Chen.
Performance: Not for Sale, Choreographer: Hui-Hsin Lu, Performers: Yueting Liu, Zhou Jie, Junxin Zhang, Ka Ki Christina Lai
In a quiet corner of Archway, London, a functioning shibari studio has been transformed into a charged space of discipline, desire, and nocturnal introspection. Nightfall Division brings together an international roster of artists, among them Annette Harvest, Caijing Kuang, Mingzhang Sun, and Louise Hapton, to explore what happens when the sun sets and the rules shift.
The exhibition takes the night as both metaphor and method, presenting it as a rupture in the social order, a place where shame, fear, and longing emerge from the shadows. Drawing on the symbolism of BDSM culture and the haunting logic of Liu Cixin’s “Dark Forest” theory, the show asks a disquieting question: in a world that champions personal freedom, what does liberty truly mean when systems of control have already been internalised?
At its entrance, a carved tombstone declaring RIP SHAME serves as both provocation and invitation. From there, the exhibition unfolds across three interconnected rooms. The first, devoted to installation and painting, interrogates the ways identity is moulded, constrained, and resisted through material and symbolic languages. The second and third spaces, housing photography, video, and sound, pull the viewer into a more visceral realm, where staged imagery and sensory immersion dissolve the boundary between audience and subject. Here, interpretation gives way to feeling, and meaning emerges in a haze of uncertainty.
Mengzhu Li’s Seeing Higher on the Shoulders of Giants (2023)
Chenqi Jiang’s Self-Portrait 1 & Self-Portrait 2 (2025)
The venue itself is no passive host. Raw, intimate, and steeped in symbolism, the shibari studio amplifies the show’s central themes of power, submission, and exposure. This spatial honesty strips away the sterility of the traditional white cube, replacing it with something riskier, more human.
On opening night, the live performance Not for Sale by choreographer Hui-Hsin Lu heightened this tension. Performed with minimal staging, it relied on the physical presence of the body to explore resistance, vulnerability, and the politics of being seen. The work, much like the exhibition as a whole, was less about offering answers than about inhabiting the questions.
BDSM, in this context, is not presented as spectacle but as metaphor. It becomes a lens through which to examine how power is enforced, and how its rules become part of our own instincts. Liu’s “Dark Forest” analogy in which survival depends on silence and invisibility resonates throughout, suggesting that in contemporary life we are simultaneously predator and prey, concealing parts of ourselves in order to endure.
Nightfall Division resists neat resolution. Instead, it invites the viewer to linger in the tension between repression and recognition. By staging its inquiry within a working space of knots, bindings, and human vulnerability, it ensures that every step through its rooms is a negotiation with power, not as spectacle, but as the possibility of transformation.
