Lodging as Mayflies

The poplar trees in Xiaoyanggezhuang—the village where artist Chen Xu lives—were cut down for renovation. While the village name remains, the very trees that inspired it has vanished. This transformation of his immediate environment served as the starting point for the solo exhibition Lodging as Mayflies. Centered on temporality, scales of perception, and traces of life, the exhibition explores the condition of individual lodging within a vast universe.

The core premise of the exhibition proposes that scale is not merely a spatial measure, but something shaped by the viewer's perspective and temporal experience. The vibrant vitality of summer stems precisely from minute survival activities, such as insects chewing leaves or boring into tree trunks. Insects live within their own limited temporal dimension, incapable of foreseeing the tree’s eventual demise. Human beings are similarly bound by the boundaries of their own perception, often mistaking the fleeting present for eternity while constructing self-meaning within the temporary.

Extending his observation of natural scale, Chen expands physical experience into the perceptual domain of digital networks. During the preparation for this exhibition, an algorithm on a second-hand platform recommended a remnant page of a Ming/Qing landscape painting bearing wormhole marks. The classic landscape imagery on paper formed a subtle dialogue with the physical wormholes, translating the philosophical reflection of “lodging like mayflies between heaven and earth” from a textual metaphor into a physical entity. Morning mushrooms and cicadas each have their own lifespans; no perspective can leap outside its own experience to render absolute judgment on what is ephemeral and what is eternal. By juxtaposing the minute traces of insect damage with celestial imagery, the works dissolve the innate hierarchy between the vast and the minuscule.

Chen further contextualises his reflections on scale in the man-made reality. The stars, the moon, streetlights, and surveillance indicators together form the nocturnal light system we take for granted, shaping our sense of distance and security. When a streetlight is momentarily mistaken for moonlight, this system of perception suddenly falters, leaving the individual struggling to anchor their position. Modern infrastructure has evolved into a form of “man-made nature”—created by humanity, yet far exceeding the scale of individual control, evoking simultaneously a sense of the sublime and of disorientation.

Drawing upon Jin Nong’s Moonlight (Yuehua Tu) to look back at the romantic imaginations of the moon in ancient times, the ancients placed themselves within an unfathomable cosmic order. Today, that mystical imagination has shifted toward technology and infrastructure, sharing a continuous thread of insignificance when confronting the immense.

The title Lodging as Mayflies emphasises the verb lodging (寄,‘to rely on’ in this case). Humans inevitably anchor themselves to entities far beyond their own scale—once the natural universe, now technological networks. We harbor the illusion that we can master the system, yet absolute certainty is itself an illusion. When the objects we rely on are not custom-tailored for human needs, we become aware of the ephemerality of existence, differentiating sojourn from settlement. Throughout this exhibition, Chen re-interrogates the position of the individual across multiple scales.