EY PROJECTS is pleased to present the duo exhibition "Two Kinds of Fracture", featuring a dialogical presentation of works by British artist Adam Boyd and Chinese artist Yichen Li. The two artists present striking contrasts in terms of medium, tradition, and temporal rhythm: one captures the immediacy and consumer landscape of the urban experience through photography, fabric, and sewing; the other inherits and transforms intangible cultural heritage techniques through meticulous wood carving, accumulating a sense of slow time and ritual. Juxtaposed, the works generate fissures and friction, revealing a shared tension concerning materiality, memory, and misreading within contemporary creation.

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"Two Kinds of Fracture" is not a binary conclusion but a curatorial strategy: generating initial surprise through the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated works, thereby inviting viewers to look beyond the surface and discern the shared ground where craftsmanship functions as a translator and "misreading" operates as a methodology. The exhibition's focus lies not in the mediums themselves, but in how each artist, through their respective craft and material experiments, decodes, deviates from, and rewrites established cultural symbols.

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Boyd's series is deeply connected to his residency experience in Japan, representing an attempt at misreading and materialization from West to East. Photography has always been central to his practice – this time returning to polaroid photography, utilizing the immediate image's material sensitivity to temperature and humidity to generate impressionistic, painterly color spots, bleeds, and textures. Boyd draws from the visual culture and everyday souvenir landscape of East Asia: visual experiences from hanging scrolls, textiles, and tourist memorabilia are stripped of their historical context and translated into material events. Using fabric sewing, plushy soft-sculpture forms, plastic clips, key rings, and other everyday objects, he concretizes the mood, hue, and material impressions of the images. Through strategies of mirroring, replication, and modularization, he moves away from reliance on digital imagery, returning to object-based and handmade image-making, allowing color fields, textures, and abstract forms to become emotional distillations of a sensed site. The work creates ruptures between representations of Eastern tradition and contemporary consumer objects, presenting a visual field imbued with a sense of ritual yet interrupted by commodified memory.

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Yichen Li's work constitutes a misreading from the ancient to the contemporary. Starting from traditional wood carving patterns and structures, she dismantles their practical functions, instead transcribing detailed ornamentation and construction into a conceptual sculptural language. Through meticulous carving techniques, she carves "voids" into the wood, making light and negative space constituent elements of the work. The slow manual labor itself forms a record of time and embodies a sense of ritual. Her works construct a walk-through wooden garden within stillness and detail, retaining traces of tradition while being rewritten by the contemporary context.

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Despite their disparate mediums and rhythms, Boyd and Li are fundamentally dedicated "translators" and "fantasists." Through manual labor and material experiments – from the layering of analog images, fabric sewing, soft sculptures, and souvenir objects, to the meticulous wood carving techniques and rewriting of historical patterns – they jointly articulate how craftsmanship can serve as a conceptual tool to bear memory, time, and critique of consumer culture. The exhibition reconstructs meaning at the points of rupture, generates imagination from deviation, and presents two parallel paths of creation: the immediate and impressionistic urban instant; the slow and ritualistic historical continuity. The overall context points towards a broader field of East Asian visual and material culture, transcending simple regional labels, emphasizing cultural flow and the interrelation of cross-regional memory.