When did you last hold a leaf up to the light? Really look at it – trace the delicate veins, feel its papery weight, notice how sunlight transforms it into something almost translucent? If you’re like most of us, trapped in concrete jungles and glass towers of cities, it’s probably been a while. We’ve built ourselves so far from nature that even our “green spaces” are carefully manicured performances of wildness, designed to fit our urban aesthetic rather than grow according to their instincts. 

This is the world Chun Ding inhabits, and it’s the tension she explores in her triptych “Blueprint for a Soft Collision.” But rather than lamenting what we’ve lost, she finds poetry in the spaces where nature and technology brush against each other, creating unexpected moments. 

Imagine you’re looking at what appears to be a botanical study, the kind Victorian naturalists might have made to catalogue distant flora. But something’s off. Items aren’t in isolation, and is that really a tattoo needle ghosting beneath a translucent leaf? Suddenly, you’re not looking at the documenting of nature but something far stranger – a conversation between the organic and the mechanical, played out in the language of light and shadow. 

Ding uses cyanotype, a photographic process that’s nearly 200 years old, where chemicals react with sunlight to create distinctive blue images. There’s something beautifully circular about using the sun, the ultimate life force, to create art about our relationship with the natural world. It’s the same sun that scorches grass, bleaches our clothes, and makes us seek shade under trees. The same energy that powers photosynthesis now powers her art. 

Instead of printing on smooth paper, she chooses fabric – a material that carries its own memory of being touched, folded, lived with. Every crease tells a story. Every thread holds history. When she prints her ethereal images onto textiles, she’s not just making art; she’s acknowledging that art lives in the same spaces we do, woven into the fabric of our daily existence. 

The work isn’t imagining a return to a pastoral past but recognising that the natural and manmade worlds are now intertwined and we must find a way to live in harmony. In our current moment of climate anxiety, it would be easy to position technology as the villain and nature as the victim. Her “soft collision” suggests something gentler – not a violent crash but a meeting that transforms both participants. The tattoo needle isn’t attacking the leaf; it’s creating a new kind of hybrid world. 

The work is small – just 18 by 12 centimetres – which means you can’t photograph it from across the room. You have to get close, really close, and spend time with it. In a world of endless scrolling and digital distraction, Ding is demanding something precious from us: our attention, our patience, our willingness to slow down and really look.   

I would like to see the impact of her work if produced at a larger scale, and whether this could amplify the friction between the natural and mechanical worlds. Whether it makes the relationship disharmonious. Could the use of different elements from both worlds create composites that grab our attention more firmly? How would the concept behind her work transfer to other media, as it could form part of a larger project across different types of photography and potentially through film and text?   

Ding’s work asks us to be archaeologists of the present moment. To dig beneath the surface of our tech-saturated lives and discover the ancient rhythms still pulsing there. Her soft collision reminds us that even in our most artificial environments, nature persists, adapts, and finds ways to speak. We just need to remember how to listen.  

About the Author 

Tabish Khan is an art critic specialising in London’s art scene and he believes passionately in making art accessible to everyone. He visits and writes about hundreds of exhibitions a year covering everything from the major blockbusters to the emerging art scene. 

Tabish has been visual arts editor for Londonist since 2013. Contributions include reviews, previews, news, experiences and opinion pieces. He is also a regular contributor for FAD with a weekly top exhibitions to see, reviews and a column called ‘What’s wrong with art’. He also regularly reviews for Culture Whisper. 

Tabish is a trustee of ArtCan, a non-profit arts organisation that supports artists through profile raising activities and exhibitions. He is also a trustee of the prestigious City & Guilds London Art School and Discerning Eye, which hosts an annual exhibition featuring hundreds of works. 

Icy Qiao is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose work spans animation, moving image, sculpture, and installation. Her practice explores the hidden, deep-rooted structures of psychological experience. Autobiographical in nature, her works delve into trauma, identity, and East Asian family structures, dissecting her own history to reflect broader social realities.

A graduate of the Royal College of Art’s Narrative Animation program, Icy blends narrative and experimental techniques in her work, challenging the confines of traditional linear animation and favoring emotionally-driven expression. By turning memory, trauma, and anxiety into tactile and visual forms, she reclaims control over her inner world while opening a space for emotional resonance with the viewer.

Her work was permanently collected by a national first-tier museum in China in 2023, marking significant recognition within both international and domestic art contexts. She sees artistic creation as an ongoing process of psychoanalysis, a way to reconstruct inner order through the continual dissection of memory and emotion. Through this process, she has carved out a distinct space in the field of contemporary multidisciplinary art.

Carving Anxiety: A Psychological Repair from Dream to Material

In her 2025 work ‘A Dream of Teeth Falling Out, Now Real’, Icy visualises subconscious anxiety through a series of clay tooth sculptures. Starting from a recurring dream— where her teeth constantly fall out and are swallowed—she embarks on a process of emotional response and psychological repair. The act of moulding each tooth, with its repetitive and slow rhythm, becomes a bodily ritual of healing. Each tooth carries fragments of the dream while symbolising the reconstruction of personal boundaries and expressive capacity.

As Icy describes:

“During a period of recurring dreams where my teeth would fall out and be swallowed whole, I began recreating each one in clay, as if extracting internalised emotional fragments from my body. Klein’s theory of ‘aggression and reparation’ unfolded through this process as I transformed unspeakable anxiety into tangible material. The teeth became both remnants of dreams and symbols of rebuilding self-boundaries and the ability to express. As I made them, my real-life anxiety gradually eased.”

This work not only continues her deep engagement with psychology but also further demonstrates her use of multimedia to delve into personal experience.

Self-inflicted Pain: Tracing Emotional Echo Within Family Fracture

Created in 2019, ‘Self-inflicted Pain’ is one of Icy’s most emotionally charged early works. The two-minute short film blends live-action and animation, breaking traditional narrative structure to explore how emotion ferments through memory in a non-linear fashion.

The work was inspired by a childhood memory of witnessing her mother cutting her own face out of a series of family photos, an act of silent defiance that became a point of departure for Icy’s reflections on disconnection, psychological rupture, and the internalisation of pain. Referencing Adler’s idea of the ‘comfort zone of trauma,’ she explores how emotional mechanisms trap individuals in cyclical replays of past events.

Incorporating seven elements and six actions, the film gradually blurs the boundaries between imagined pain and reality.

As one of her early pieces, its form is restrained, but through structural deconstruction and rhythmic repetition, Icy begins translating private family memories into an abstract

visual language, allowing individual experience to resonate emotionally with viewers. This work marks the beginning of her ongoing exploration into the relationship between emotion, memory, and the body.

Narrative Collapse: Absurdity and Fragmentation in the Information Era

In works like ‘Brain Travel’ and ‘Stream’, Icy continues using animation and live-action techniques to critique the cognitive disarray and social homogenization of the digital era. She consciously breaks the coherence of linear storytelling, allowing fragments, repetition, and ambiguity to become the structural core of emotional narrative, mirroring the anxiety and fragmentation we experience in real life.

Her practice questions not only media forms but also the capacity of narrative itself to carry emotional experience.

The Shadow of Symbiosis: Emotional Silence in East Asian Family Structures

Icy’s work consistently examines the complex psychological dynamics of East Asian family culture, particularly pathological symbiosis, blurred emotional boundaries, and long-term repression. She investigates phenomena such as ‘giant baby syndrome’ and the ‘great mother’ family dynamic, translating these culturally embedded structures into symbolic visual language through animation, moving image, and installation.

Through this ongoing process of self-analysis, she offers viewers a space to reflect on how we are shaped by cultural forces—and how art can become a gentle form of resistance.

Language and Its Wording: An Artistic Practice Where Content Chooses the Medium

Icy’s artistic process is never constrained by medium. For her, art is a language, and the medium is its phrasing. She does not impose fixed forms, but lets the authenticity of expression guide her choices, selecting the medium best suited to each project’s emotional and thematic weight. Animation, live action, installation, sculpture—these are the shifting vocabularies she uses to tell her stories.

Her works are often born at the intersection of personal memory and social psychology, focusing on how individuals locate themselves within family structures, cultural identities, and emotional trauma. When faced with inexpressible experiences, she carefully constructs formal and narrative frameworks to give emotion a space to land and opens the possibility for deep, reflective dialogue with the audience.

In her practice, there is no fixed technique or predetermined aesthetic, only a persistent pursuit of emotional resonance that always begins with content. It is this freedom and honesty that give her work its enduring strength.

When you bite into a fruit, pause. When you run your fingers across a leaf, pause. Let each pause be a line break in the prose of routine. 

John Cage famously said in his Lecture on Nothing “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it”. This mystical, contemplative nothing is shining and free in curators Moyu Yang and Chang Wang’s The Green Grammar, produced, supported and co-curated by host Gallery, ArtSect. The exhibition runs from June 27 to June 29 at art’otel, Hoxton.The exhibition was blooming with paintings, sculptures, ceramics, films, and most importantly – food and flowers. The Green Grammar draws on spirituality, ecology, mysticism, the body, and philosophy of language. This exhibition does not seek to dualistically answer questions regarding these ideas, but instead gestures to the shifting nature of these ideas within ourselves, our natural world and our created world.

ArtSect Gallery is a nomadic entity that builds, produces, and curates both physical and digital exhibitions across London, Athens, and the Middle East. Their focus lies in subtle geopolitics, psychology, LGBTQ+ voices, and emerging immersive and sensory practices. Incubating new artists and fostering cross-border communication between regions presents both logistical and social challenges—challenges that ArtSect is actively exploring and will continue to engage with in the years to come.

“Green Grammar was a joy to produce and a wonderful opportunity to experiment with sensory and aural experience, blending curation, literature, and human touch. We are very proud of our curatorial partners, Moyu and Chang, and look forward to more experimentation, public interaction, and future productions.”

—Christian Dyson, Co-founder, ArtSect

These works engage more with the somatic experience of language and dining, rather than focusing on spoken language itself. As a whole, the exhibition moves beyond conventional notions of mindfulness or meditative experience. Rather than inducing a state  of calm, the works invite participants into a deeper, contemplative awareness.           

At the opening night, Lancy Liu, a sensory artist who works primarily with food as her medium, curated a four-course dining experience for the debut night of The Green Grammar. She specialises in using experimental approaches to restructure edible materials, exploring how food can function as language and narrative. The social aspect of this experience must also be emphasised, as a warm and inviting atmosphere beamed throughout the night. Her practice brings together edible sculpture, biomimetic structures, and aforementioned based syntax, placing controlled craftsmanship alongside the unpredictable beauty of natural transformation. 

Beginning with Verdant Island, the language of plants grew like a mycelial web. This was followed by Orchard Blossom and Dew of Dawn, concluding with the edible sculpture; material language. The base of both works is made from bread-based edible sculpture, shaped by hand to resemble tree bark and weathered stone. The pieces had naturally fermented and cracked in time – their quiet transformation embodying the space where memory gathers and language begins, allowing the plants they held to speak.

As an ecosystem, the flowers and set all felt wholly unique and complementary – necessary and uplifting to each other. Artist and florist, Phuong Anh Nguyễn. Her brand, Fleur De Lune (Flower of the Moon, or peace lily – nature’s lunar pacifier) lends Southeast Asian shou dance with Western floral craftsmanship, forming a cross-cultural harmony rich in nuance. Her work transcends traditional floristry, entering into art and cultural dialogue — a continuing song of heritage and adopted home. Like Liu’s contributions, Nguyễn’s floral arrangements were created specifically for The Green Grammar.

Together, these three elements — food, flora, and form — produced a rich psychosomatic experience, where the audience’s participation and interpretation evolved into a living extension of the artwork itself. The work enabled an ongoing dialogue across the gallery: a chorus of community and shared pleasure.

The food and flowers were gorgeously complemented by an array of artworks. Yang’s work Set, a modular candelabrum assembled in its grandest form for the occasion, gestures toward the shifting identities women navigate between private and public realms. Its presence illuminated Liu’s piece which, owing to its sensational taste, was devoured not so mindfully, yet with undeniable joy.

Ruiyi Wang’s The Restaurant finds its place seamlessly within the exhibition. In this work, forks twist and stretch around elegantly crafted ceramic bowls, subtly distorting the familiarity of domestic dining. Her sculptures challenge the social rituals embedded in table settings, exposing a primal, almost feral instinct beneath the veneer of etiquette.In contrast, Ruixin Wang—an accessories designer and object artist—explores cutlery as a symbol of power and social hierarchy. Her project uses bones to represent both life and consumption. By transforming discarded bones into wearable tools, she reverses the roles of predator and prey, subverting the elite’s weaponised utensils and challenging notions of status through everyday objects. 

Nearby, Anyi Ji’s Moved by the Stirrings of the Heart (2025) features white stoneware vases and a shell cradling a flourish of green plant life. The arrangement draws on the aesthetics of wabi-sabi, celebrating imperfection and impermanence. The texture of the plants mirrors the vases’ own rough surfaces, blurring the line between vessel and growth, containment and becoming.

As the audiences participate in the work—and indeed become part of it—they are surrounded by a multitude of pieces from talented young artists.Directly opposite the table stands the exhibition’s largest piece: The Dream of the Road by James Lang, a sprawling tree set against a muted blue sky. Inspired by early medieval Christian art, the painting conceals and reveals a message embedded in a grid across its surface, offering a visual meditation on revelation, memory, and the sacred.

Adjacent to Lang’s work is a textured canvas by Jingshan, who uses cracked tree bark as a metaphor for human fragility and resilience. Through the repeated layering and scraping of paint, she echoes the way bark naturally accumulates and erodes over time—inviting reflection on vulnerability, endurance, and the passage of time.

Beside this is Caitlin Hazell’s sculptural installation: a delicate chain formed entirely from bread. By transforming this humble, universally recognisable material into a symbol of quiet restraint, Hazell explores the weight of the mundane and the invisible rituals that shape daily life.

Continuing along the gallery’s contours, we encounter Blossoms of Decay by Wanting Wang. In this piece, rotting food is photographed as vibrant floral life bursts from its core. By embedding vitality into decomposing forms, Wang questions whether human intervention generates renewal or imposes corruption. The work challenges our perceptions of beauty, transformation, and the fragile illusion of impermanence.

Yichen He’s Flower and the Scarlet Omen merges cyanotype with oil painting to create a dialogue between organic form and expressive texture. A solitary white flower is encircled by a luminous red halo—minimal yet potent—contemplating humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world.

Beside it, Tianxi Wang’s Me and Inch’s explores an intimate relationship with a houseplant that has been a long-time companion. Paired with a self-portrait, the piece radiates a quiet spiritual support, reflecting the emotional connection between artist and plant—two living beings growing alongside each other.

Turning a corner, we find Cosima Von Moreau’s Peep Hole (2024), a serene assemblage of soft porcelain and resin on board. Drawing inspiration from the intricacy of nature, the work becomes a contemplative mirror—reflecting not just the outside world, but the viewer’s own sense of peace. A similar sentiment is echoed in her other piece, Infinity (2024).

In Bringers of Fertility, Above and Below, Katya Morgan Sykes conjures a spiritual connection with the fungal realm. With skeletal, organic forms, the work draws on animism, myth, and the interwoven dependencies of living systems.

Nearing the end of the circuit, we encounter Xueting Chen’s No.1, a reinterpretation of concrete through the lens of technological failure and emerging fragility. By destabilising the material’s conventional strength, Chen transforms cement into a precarious structure—one that appears solid but is on the edge of collapse, evoking themes of land, memory, and vulnerability.

Root Animals, a UV print on mixed media, draws inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome. Opposing hierarchical structures and ideal forms, the work explores life’s small, interconnected moments—rain, breeze, friendship—suggesting meaning grows horizontally, not vertically.

Finally, we come full circle—both spatially and conceptually—with Lu Kuangyi’s we can never clearly see what stands before us (2025). These mirrored paintings, placed at the beginning and end of the exhibition, explore the liminal space between organism and object, where time, perception, and reality begin to dissolve. Their quiet symmetry signals a move away from emotional immediacy toward a search for unfamiliar truths—glimpses of a world that feels both unsettling and newly revealed.

Herman Hesse, a key inspiration in manifesting the exhibition, said “Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” Yang and Wang together have curated an exhibition with deep, contemplative roots and long branches that extend graciously without reaching. The art here sees us – our ideas of nature and language, and their reality – in all dimensions, glorious and transcendent. 

Exhibition Details:

Dates: June 27 – 29th, 2025
Opening: 6:00 PM, Jun 27th, 2025
Location: Art’otel London Hoxton Gallery and Auditorium, 1-3 Rivington St, London EC2A 3DT

Curators:

Moyu Yang, Chang Wang

Participating Artists:

Anyi Ji, Phuong Anh Nguyễn, Cosima Von Moreau, Caitlin Hazell, Lancy Liu, Xueting Chen, Katya Morgansykes, Ume Dahlia, Ruixin Wang, Ruiyi Wang, Xin Zhang, James Lang, Kuangyi Lu, Aura Sun, Jingshan Ding, Tianxi Wang, Yichen He, Wanting Wang 

Abbie Wilson produced this piece with the generous editorial contribution of Daniel Northover.

The screening of The Green Grammar Exhibition in Art’otel Gallery Hoxton unfolds like a quiet choreography of everyday materials, bodies, and ecological sensibilities. Tucked away from the white walls of the gallery, it takes shelter in a dim, intimate room in Art’otel gallery Hoxton, produced, supported and co-curated by host Gallery, ArtSect.The exhibition runs from June 27 to June 29 at art’otel, Hoxton.Interweaving themes of food, nature, and the philosophy of everyday mundane, these video artworks explore how meaning is constructed through soft gestures, tactile matter, and the unspoken logic of personal and collective memory. Just as grammar shapes how we communicate, these works uncover the quiet systems of meaning that emerge through emotion, memory, and the rhythms of daily life.

ArtSect Gallery is a nomadic entity that builds, produces, and curates both physical and digital exhibitions across London, Athens, and the Middle East. Their focus lies in subtle geopolitics, psychology, LGBTQ+ voices, and emerging immersive and sensory practices. Incubating new artists and fostering cross-border communication between regions presents both logistical and social challenges—challenges that ArtSect is actively exploring and will continue to engage with in the years to come.

“Green Grammar was a joy to produce and a wonderful opportunity to experiment with sensory and aural experience, blending curation, literature, and human touch. We are very proud of our curatorial partners, Moyu and Chang, and look forward to more experimentation, public interaction, and future productions.”
—Christian Dyson, Co-founder, ArtSect

In Tong Yin’s Eating at yt’s, a 16mm stop-motion film depicts a surreal yet tender ritual of eating. Guided by a set of hand-made textile tableware, the act of dining becomes symbolic, a soft protest against the creeping gentrification of East London. Domestic objects, sewn and staged, take on the weight of social commentary. There is something quietly rebellious in this choice of medium and material: the film doesn’t shout, it folds critique into craft, and memory into metaphor.

Beiyi Wang’s Today I had a meeting about the value with apple, stone and matsutake proposes a speculative, non-anthropocentric worldview where fungi, minerals, and fruits become agents in a dialogue about value. The work imagines a sociality that transcends the human, gently questioning how worth is defined and by whom. It is both a dream and a provocation: what if the economy were run by moss and mushrooms?

Iris Lingyu Zhang’s A Punch on TOFU draws on a Chinese idiom to evoke the dissonance of unmet confrontation. In this visually playful yet conceptually sharp video, frustration takes shape as something soft, ungraspable just like punching tofu. There is a humor here, yes, but also a subtle comment on the emotional labor of communication, especially when affect meets apathy. Zhang’s work lands like a delayed echo, subtle, but resonant.

In Tianyun Zhao’s PURE · CURE, sweetness becomes a lens for existential reflection. A single-channel film meditates on sugar as more than pleasure as a quiet endurance. Zhao asks: can sweetness heal, not just mask? The tone is contemplative, drifting somewhere between sensuality and sincerity, suggesting that even small comforts can be forms of resistance in a harsh world.

Yingying Li’s I Embody the Trees adopts the structure of a screen-based triptych, presenting a minimal but emotionally potent tableau.  From tree to body, a rope runs over three panels, yet the connection remains visually tenuous, almost slipping out of sync. The work moves like a breath held too long: tense, suspended, never quite landing. In this disjunction, Li opens a space of quiet estrangement, gesturing toward the complex entanglements between nature, gendered bodies, and psychic distance.

Anning Song’s Brand and Scar shifts us into darker digital terrain. Through fragmented imagery and an unsettling narrative, the video artworks explore the emotional violence inflicted by online misinformation. In the blurred boundaries between real and virtual, victim and spectator, Song draws attention to how scars are etched by language, branding, and virality. This piece feels especially timely: a sharp reminder of the psychic cost of public scrutiny.

Together, these six video artworks collectively create a scattered syntax of tension, care, and slow investigation. There are no sweeping declarations, only gestures, textures, and loops. The screening room becomes a soft archive of thoughts: some raw, some refined, all vital.

In an age of ecological and informational noise, The Green Grammar offers, through moving images, a kind of counter-language,one that listens, that senses, that whispers before it speaks.

The Green Grammar does not seek to shout above the din. Instead, it leans into slowness, into sensation, into the fragile syntax of gestures and atmospheres.The Green Grammar Cinema becomes a form of listening, through moving images, a kind of counter-language, one that listens, that senses, that whispers before it speaks.

Exhibition Details:

Dates: Jun 27 – 29th, 2025

Opening: 6:00 PM, Jun 27th, 2025
Location: Art’otel London Hoxton Gallery and Auditorium, 1-3 Rivington St, London EC2A 3DT

Curators:

Moyu Yang, Chang Wang

Participating Artists:

Tong Yin,Yingying Li,Tianyun Zhao,Anning Song,Iris Lingyu Zhang,Beiyi Wang