The Thing-in-Itself and Re-Coding — Contemporary Object Narratives in Semantic Shifts

The exhibition is presented by Synonym Lab and curated by YDMD Studio, with Wei Mo as Curatorial Director and Xuan Xu as Curatorial Assistant. It is academically supported by the Jewellery and Metal Studio of the School of Fine Arts, Shanghai University. The exhibition runs from 29 May to 1 June 2025 at Mezzanine, a hybrid art space located in South Bermondsey, London.

In a society saturated with images and fragmented semantics, how can we reframe our understanding of the role of the “object”? The Thing-in-Itself and Re-Coding, produced by Synonym Lab and curated by YDMD Studio, takes this question as its point of departure. Drawing from the theory of the “semantic turn,” the exhibition explores how contemporary objects act as mediators of meaning within intersecting contexts of culture, technology, and embodied experience. With academic support from the Jewellery and Metal Studio of Shanghai University, the exhibition rethinks the object through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural lens.

MEZZANINE: A CONTEMPORARY SITE OF PRACTICE ON THE MARGINS OF LONDON

The exhibition takes place at Mezzanine, a hybrid art space located in South Bermondsey, London, integrating artist residencies, exhibitions, and studios. As one of the emerging hubs for independent art communities in recent years, South Bermondsey is becoming a sanctuary for young artists and grassroots institutions seeking to escape the pressures of the city centre. Here, space functions not only as a physical container but also as a mental grounding. Mezzanine embodies a strong sense of situated practice—open, collaborative, and loosely structured—emphasizing the inseparability of art and everyday life.

The exhibition takes "The Fission from Object to Sign" as its curatorial thread, showcasing works by more than ten artists across painting, sculpture, mixed media, digital video, interactive installations, and jewellery. These artists de-functionalize and re-contextualize everyday objects, transforming them from static exhibits into active participants in cultural critique, psychological reflection, and social insight.

When facing these works, the audience is not asked to "understand" the object, but rather to engage in a process of negotiation—co-generating meaning with the object itself.

ARTIST COLLECTIVE: CONSTRUCTORS OF CONTEMPORARY VISUAL LANGUAGE

ARTIST GROUP: CONSTRUCTORS OF CONTEMPORARY VISUAL LANGUAGE

The artists participating in this exhibition hail from London and the broader international contemporary art scene, remaining active at the forefront of creative and academic exploration. Among them are artists deeply embedded in London’s local culture and visual language system, such as Dien Berziga, James Lang, and Fitzroy Schofield, as well as practitioners like Minyue Hu, who specializes in glass as a medium, and Yvette Yujie Yang, who integrates photography, installation, and narrative. Their work blends material experimentation with poetic expression.

In the realm of new media, Weihang Zhu employs aluminum transfer techniques to conduct experimental interventions into the body and perceptual mechanisms. Tianhui Zheng continuously expands the expressive boundaries of sculpture through material collage and structural reconstruction. Wenbin Sun’s practice focuses on the fusion of branding, dynamic imagery, and generative art, exploring the edges of visual storytelling and symbolic language across two and three dimensions.

Simultaneously, Weiyi Chen and Haoran Chen transform personal psychological experiences into tactile material narratives through tie-dye and texture-based generation. The exhibition also includes emerging artists from Shanghai University, who exhibit strong experimental awareness and cultural perspective at the intersection of material research and contemporary expression.

These artists are not “emerging” in the conventional sense, but rather, through mature creative systems, they continue to expand the boundaries of contemporary visual language. Their practices use materials as mediums, the body as a thread, and culture as context—emphasizing an expansion from personal experience into shared perceptual structures. In this exhibition, they converge into a diverse, intertextual, and tension-filled semantic network that collectively responds to issues such as technological alienation, cultural dislocation, and symbolic overflow in contemporary society.

CURATORIAL PERSPECTIVE: A SITE FOR CO-CREATED MEANING

“We are not attempting to define the meaning of objects, but to construct a site for the generation of meaning,” notes the curatorial team at YDMD Studio. “The objects in this exhibition are continuously activated and re-coded through different creative languages. They are not only carriers of information and translators of history but also participatory agents.” Here, the object is neither a mere tool of the artist nor simply a target for the viewer—it becomes an intermediary collaboratively shaped by artist, viewer, and space.

ACADEMIC COLLABORATION: STRUCTURAL THINKING FROM SHANGHAI

Thing-in-Itself and Re-encoding does not attempt to conclude what an object is—it functions more as a sketch experiment in the visual realm. What it activates is not only the object itself, but the fluid relationships between object and context, object and body, object and society. What it offers is not merely a visual experience, but a participatory, negotiated, and empathetic space.

CLOSING STATEMENT: AN UNFINISHED SEMANTIC PROPOSAL

In Mezzanine—a space charged with the tension of the periphery—these artists are charting new ways of understanding the world. From the object, we return to the human, arriving at a place where meaning remains in progress.