CHAPTER 6 is honored to present artist Shi Yangkun’s first solo exhibition—at present. Working through narratives of history, collective experience, and individual memory, Yangkun conducts a form of micro-archaeology of documents and archives, probing the hidden mechanisms of power, violence, and trauma embedded within images—and how they remain deeply entangled with contemporary reality.

The works in this exhibition are based on his research of China’s modern and contemporary history, unearthing marginal or overlooked fragments of documentation—books, texts, photographs, and videos—that reflect themes of colonization and dissolution, the intrusion of modernity, dynamic relations among ethnic and regional groups, and violence as spectacle. Through methods such as replication, extraction, re-photography, juxtaposition, and video recording, Yangkun exposes, intervenes in, and deconstructs the underlying logic of these archival materials: the productive nature of power. The resulting works, spanning installation, video, and photography, manifest the artist’s personal acts of “distortion” and “paradoxes making” as a creator.

The theme of the exhibition—at present—proposes that the present is the precondition for understanding history. If history itself is vast and silent, it is only through contemporary perspectives and questionings that a particular historical fragment can be activated, endowed with new meaning and relevance. If looking back is inherently a distortion, Yangkun’s art practice employs deliberate “distortion” to informed dislocation—between fiction and truth, past and present. The works, situated in the here and now, in turn become the silent archives of tomorrow. He does not seek to answer what history is, but instead asks curiously: How is history produced? Perhaps the past, present, and future are, in the end, only in dialogue.