The paintings of Chinese artist Yiwen take the sharpness of biological forms from plants as their subject. After a year of planning, through residency and creation, Space of Time Gallery is thrilled to present Yiwen’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Differentiated from her focus on the sharp form in previous works, this new body of paintings begin with the tender, slow yet powerful shelled molluscs—building fortresses from softness, slowly stretching and growing.

Alongside the sharpness in plants, I also sense the softness in animal forms, this hidden strength of life never fails to move me.
— Yiwen

We often assume nature is harmonious and beautiful, as if its danger and fierce competition exist only on television. Yet in natural, we always resume the cycles of coexisting and confronting, different forces of power are always coexisting in the same ecosystem. Spikes, rings, and spirals— the popular elements in Yiwen’s paintings—stem from her close observations during the daily walks: the composite forms of fungi and algae living in symbiosis, the hard exoskeletons evolved by molluscs, plant thorns sharp enough to pierce skin, or vines that coil around trees until they strangle them. These seemingly calm, slow processes are in fact filled with coexist and competition. Using organic forms as her medium, Yiwen’s artworks express a universal yet personal feeling. Through artistic methods of replication and reconstruction, combined with her distinctive tender and graphic visual language, her artworks offer a space to reflect on the relationship between individual perception and the natural world.

In this new body of works, Yiwen drawn attention on the spiral forms of shelled molluscs and their radiating growth patterns. Spiral appears throughout our universe—from a 1cm snail shell to the form of a galaxy—as referenced in her work Galaxy Messier M51 and Sundial Snail (2025). The spiral form emerge deeply in bacteria, algae, climbing plants, shark eggs, and animal bones. Every spine, rib, and spiral curve on a mollusc’s shell is a record of time. Evolution has perfected these biological forms—nature’s own design.

Molluscs originated since the Cambrian Explosion. Their movements seem passive, lacking initiative, intelligence, or intent. This defensiveness has its double-edged: the protective hard shells covered the most tender and soft form of lives, it is defensive yet vulnerable. Through this seemingly passive approach, they have survived from the Cambrian period until today. Like their sluggish movement, their evolutionary progress is equally gradual—as if their existence was always meant to unfold in this slow stretch of growth.