Where direction fades, forms still take flight.
ArtOrb and The Last Abstraction Gallery present Ephemeral Odyssey.
The exhibition reflects on how presences, however fleeting and directionless, can cross immeasurable distances, inscribing delicate traces within the flow of time. It features works by 13 artists across installation, moving image, painting, photography and sound.
A life, however brief and unmoored, can still travel far enough to leave a trace upon the endless river of time. In this vision, flight becomes a way of imagining structure, understood here as a vessel that is ephemeral yet capable of preserving traces of will. If structure is a form that resists dissolution over time, then flight is its instantaneous counterpart: a way of momentarily constituting that form within a single breath, like the echo of a sound suspended in air, or light bending through a drop of water. Its course remains uncertain, yet every unfolding carries an internal field of force, leading to no geographic destination.
As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed, the momentary image can carry the weight of duration, capturing time for an instant within the curve of a gesture. Through their directionless persistence, these flights summon momentary constellations, shapes that, within the briefest of light-years, are capable of enclosing the question of existence. They serve no migratory function, engage no survival instinct, and approach a state of transparency; their meaning-structures remain unopened. Yet they continue to occur, fulfilling themselves under an unnamable necessity. It is precisely in their most useless moments that meaning reveals its most authentic contours.
In Ephemeral Odyssey, 13 artists offer their own interpretations of the fleeting, presenting passages of experience through shifting textures, layers and contexts. Some works draw the viewer into a mesh of fine detail, others unfold as measured sequences fading into stillness, or as fragments to be pieced together in thought. Together, they form a shifting field where presences meet and touch.
As the viewer moves through the gallery, they pass from shadow into light, from silence into overlapping resonance, each transition a brief architecture that dissolves as the next takes shape.
Exhibition Details
Ephemeral Odyssey was on view at The Last Abstraction Gallery, Ottakringer Str. 23, 1160 Vienna, Austria, from 28 to 30 August 2025.
Artists: Chunyu Chen, Hongjie Zhao, Lexiong Ying, Liang Zhang, Mengxin Li, Minglin He, Qianru Yang, Weihang Zhu, Xi Shen, Xiaoping Yu, Xingyi Qu, Xinwei Ye, Yinting Li.
