Opacity: On Viscous Surfaces: Curated by Weifan Mo and Xumeng Zhang

Regarder, c'est oublier les noms des choses que l'on voit.

(To look is to forget the names of the things one sees.)

— Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin (1937)

LATITUDE Gallery and L@antipode Project are pleased to present Opacity: On Viscous Surfaces, an online group exhibition featuring recent works by Tindra Eliason, Yufei Huang, Shihao Lin, Vinícius Lopes, Yihan Pan, and Chris Shubat, curated by Weifan Mo and Xumeng Zhang. 

Paul Valéry’s injunction serves as the point of departure, marking the threshold where the gaze is finally unburdened. There is a violence in naming—a swift, diagnostic strike that flattens the world into a series of transparent utilities, rendering the surface beneath our notice. We have been conditioned to read the world as if it were nothing more than glass, piercing through to a predetermined truth. Opacity is our manifesto against this clarity.

We embrace the act of seeing as forgetting. To see, truly, is to undergo an erasure: the shedding of the label, the syntax, and the name, until the object is stripped of its utility and returned to its primal, mute density.

The viscous is the medium of this un-naming. It acts as an interstitial depth—a sticky, tactile suspension between the eye and the object. Vision sheds its extractive habit, collapsing into an insidious, total submersion; the optical impulse is tethered to the terrain, dragged into a deepening friction where the surface dictates the rhythm of our own perception. It is a synesthetic weight: the way a shadow feels like oil, or a line gathers like a drop of heavy liquid, pulling the eye into the material’s own sluggish, internal time. Viscosity performs an unyielding geography of the immediate.

Tindra Eliason and Yufei Huang return to material presences and intimate arrangements, letting familiar forms slip away from immediate recognition through illumination, softened edges, and material reflection. Eliason’s paintings present ambiguous object-forms: the subjects seem almost identifiable. At the same time, dim backgrounds and gently lit contours create a subtle tension that makes them appear strange within the familiarity of everyday life. Huang, by contrast, focuses on everyday arrangements, capturing with particular sensitivity the shape and duration of radiance as it settles across each depicted element. Whether in the rounded fullness of green grapes or the slow melting of old ice cubes in a glass, different materials respond to daily experience through refraction, transparency, and condensation, giving ordinary matter a renewed density in the return of glow.

Shihao Lin and Yihan Pan turn toward traces, memory, and disappearance, where images, water, illumination, figures, plants, and animal forms become fragile residues of time. Lin’s practice unfolds around texture, image, and the fluidity of memory. Through a mixed-media process that translates etched photography onto deerskin, the image naturally seeps and diffuses during its formation, gradually losing its original clarity and edges. The work seems to stage the movement of memory from recognition to blur and eventual forgetting, turning the pictorial plane into a field where time and perception accumulate together. Pan’s practice extends from photography to canvas, continually attending to forms that are fleeting and weightless, yet marked by traces of transformation. Drops of water, rays of light, dust, plants, horses, moths, and the quiet blue atmosphere of night become subjects worthy of close looking in her work. Moving between appearance and disappearance, presence and withdrawal, the measurement of the world and the point at which measurement fails, Pan lets small things carry the silent weight of time, memory, and perception.

Vinícius Lopes and Chris Shubat situate opacity within the contemporary field of images, disturbing the stability of reality through figures, mediated veneers, psychological fragments, and visual noise. Influenced by new media visual experience, Lopes’s paintings respond to images, figures, and modes of looking shaped by contemporary reality. His work moves between abstraction and figuration: the human figure is not always clearly defined, but gradually emerges or recedes through the viewer’s gaze. Within this unstable recognizability, Lopes reveals how images of reality are reorganized into shifting perceptual states. Shubat’s paintings, meanwhile, explore the unstable psychological terrain between collapse and recovery, constructing layered visual narratives with the airbrush, an unconventional painting medium. Scenes of violence, tranquil arrangements, moments of torment, and idealized landscapes are placed within the same pictorial field, where beauty and despair, serenity and chaos coexist without resolution.

Opacity: On Viscous Surfaces requires a labor of the gaze. There is a stubborn insistence in this movement, a recurrence of texture that feels less like a choice and more like a body’s thirst. As memory generates and overwrites, as it dissolves and is laboriously pieced together, it incants an invocation in the language of the opaque.