From 12 April to 30 May, 2025F, EY PROJECTS is pleased to present Hua Jian Ci / Lyrics Among Paintings (画间词), a transcultural duo exhibition by French artist Nicolas Gaume and Chinese artist Li Baige. This exhibition holds dual milestone significance: it marks Nicolas Gaume's first exhibition in Mainland China and Li Baige's debut presentation of his complete still-life series. This exhibition deconstructs linear temporality through a variety of artistic approaches: Gaume fossilizes temporal fragments in geological sedimentations of pigment, while Li weaves memory topologies with printmaking-inspired repetitive brushwork. Their experimental fusion of oil painting, mural techniques, and printmaking transmutes time into tactile materiality.

The exhibition title Lyrics among the Paintings conceals a linguistic play—the homophonic substitution of "painting" (画) for "flower" (花)—transplanting the literary DNA of the Song Dynasty poetry anthology Huajian ji (《花间词》, Among the Flowers) into contemporary art. Li Baige responds to this tradition with his eponymous work Among the Flowers, where still-life objects dissolve into the rhythm of tonal patterns through layered gray tones. Meanwhile, Nicolas Gaume’s textual inscriptions on limestone-based canvases transform the pictorial surface into a visible French poem. As the metric rules of "lyrics among the flowers" morph into the chromatic cadence of "lyrics among the paintings," poetry and painting engage in a transmedia dialogue across the bridge of phonetics.

Li Baige infuses the lyrical subtlety of Chinese classical cipai (lyric meters) into still lifes—the wooden grain of an aged chair preserves lingering warmth, the glazed surface of a bathtub refracts the creases of intimate moments. These objects, layered in ash-toned imprints, morph into "sonnets of objects." In contrast, Nicolas Gaume sometimes engraves fragmented French verses onto self-made lime-based canvases. His cool-toned works resemble time-weathered murals, where sandpaper-polished mineral textures interlace with segments popped up from his stream of consciousness, collaging into poetic compositions that linger between the past, the present, and the future.

Gaume’s practice is a form of Geological Archaeology, as it mirrors stratigraphic excavation. Using porous grounds blended with glue and chalk as "canvas strata," he nourishes highly diluted pigments layer by layer, allowing chromatic fields to grow like coral reefs. Sandpapering exposes pale "memory faults," while engraved texts resemble cryptic messages etched into ancient rock. This obsession with unfinishedness transforms each painting into a palimpsest of time—"I spend more time staring at the canvas than painting it," the artist admits, where every brushstroke becomes "a question mark cast into time’s abyss."

In counterpoint, Li’s still-life theater stages memory’s topological distortions. The bed and the bathtub in the compositions resurface through layers and layers of woodblock printing—their contours persisting like reefs eroded yet unyielding to tides. The multiplicity of imprints abandons printmaking’s precision, letting errors in brushwork reveal time’s erosive traces: a chair’s curvature cradles the memory of numerous overlapping instants, while lemon-yellow glazes piercing gray tones mimic the sudden rupture of forgotten veils—akin to the Proustian shock of a Madeleine’s aroma.

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When Gaume’s lime canvases meet Li’s gray-tone still lifes in the gallery, two temporal dimensions resonate: vertical geological sedimentation clashes with horizontal memory sprawl, reconstructing time’s crystalline lattice through pigment and symbol. Visitors witness stardust from palette-knife scrapings settle into the cracks of an old chair, hear the whisper of sandpaper harmonize with the brittle crackle of thawing memories. Alongside the two artists, EY PROJECTS frames painting’s materiality as multidimensional – the crackled surfaces are the cross-sections of time; the repetitive images turn into rulers measuring memory; the unfinished edges emerge as peotic fissures leading to eternity.