IMPULSE Magazine: Review “The Time It Takes to See”

Review Nov 18 Written By Rui Jiang
Rui Jiang, IMPULSE Magazine, November 18, 2025

A new trap set by a dialogue among paintings slides into place on the lower level of LATITUDE Gallery. Curated by Shuang Cai, Ye Cheng and Xinran Guan’s duo exhibition The Time It Takes to See constructs an unlicensed underground amusement ground. The viewer emerges slightly exhausted after playing along; the rhythm of the air refuses to return to its usual balance—moisture clings to you, pulled downward by gravity, toward something deeper. The curatorial statement gives no warning about this forced-yet-natural mode of amusement; it merely gestures, with restrained politeness and a sly undertone, toward an expectation of time-lag. The hint is both considerate and cunning, suggesting that the exhibition may be a continuous curve of halts, returns, passages, and slips.

Ye Cheng’s paintings, at first glance, carry a kind of astringent strangeness (like hearing the noise of fingernails scraping across a chalkboard). A cubic cut on a stone peak opens like a door; stepping onto a stairway of mountain imagery, one has no idea where it leads, and it even shines—perhaps this is nature lubricated by human civilization? Looking again at the title, Happy excursion series—a delirium of wandering mechanical landscapes—the smoothness feels intentional, even slightly accusatory, prompting the viewer to either distrust it or capitulate to its artificial hospitality. The entire series reads like a safety manual disguised as a utopian handbook—danger concealed, pleasure mechanically processed. 

 

In contrast to Cheng’s work, Xinran Guan’s mode of play stands upright and fully extended. In each piece, the relationship between the painted narrative and the title completes a translation with a just-right balance—neither heavy nor light—eliciting a small, knowing smile, as if performing a somersault in place. Guan’s pictures contain large empty areas that are hard to ignore, like a palm that has been tightly clenched and then slowly turns pale, suspended in tension. The bodily sensation is similar to playing a freeze-and-move game like “Red Light, Green Light” with the viewer. The waves—visually as thin as gauze—carry a density closer to milk and the downward weight of a waterfall. The semi-solid gleam appears innocently bright. Light flowing out from the seam between half-dream and half-wake states settles into the winding textures of her brushstrokes, where it is held and soothed. Slow perception and a sense of turbulent motion are wrapped into each tide, pushing further into the dream world.
 

One side of the exhibition offers a metallic mountain labyrinth; the other, an arc of a wave that has not yet fallen. Taken together, the exhibition breathes in intentionally mismatched rhythms—an uneven alternation of inhaling and exhaling. Amusement distills itself into a cognitive method, operating as a quiet, enduring friction rather than levity. The space within the works carries a measured restraint, a kind of autonomous will that playfully “corrects” the viewer’s habits of seeing and spatial sensing. The two artists’ works interact with nearly conspiratorial precision. Their agreement on an underlying narrative structure appears settled long before the viewer enters. The viewer toggles between two lures—advancing and pausing—until eventually accepting the impossibility of quick reading and becoming comfortable with the pervasive, low-grade crisis. Much like Cheng’s landscapes, one must ultimately yield to the constant micro-corrections the works insist upon.

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