A Space Gallery is pleased to present Everything Was True For A Moment, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Qiaosi Chen. Using objects, images, and the body as mediums, Chen constructs a fragmented, non-linear visual language informed by memory, metaphor, and sensation. His gestures and images do not aim toward grand statements but represent a slow, careful inquiry into how we perceive the world. His works are ambiguous and sometimes elusive but reveal brief flashes of clarity—like signals briefly emerging through static.
Working across video, installation, photography, and performance, Chen generates temporary belief systems within everyday spaces, evoking an enduring sense of unstable reality. Trained in engineering and media/design studies, he does not attempt to reconcile these two disciplines. Instead, he moves fluidly between science and mysticism, control and chance, logic and emotion. His practice is not conceptually predetermined but arises intuitively—capturing subtle experiences that resist naming, experiences glimpsed on the periphery of consciousness that gradually
accumulate and take form through his works.
The exhibition’s title, Everything Was True For A Moment, reflects Chen’s ongoing exploration into moments of belief as a space where truth and imagination might coexist. In Chen’s practice, dreams and reality do not oppose each other but sit side by side; linear narrative is disrupted, and memory drifts into reassembled, illogical forms. To him, truth is not a fixed entity but something momentary—formed when imagination, perception, and emotion briefly align in a particular time and space. Although impossible to prove or replicate, such moments possess their own compelling reality, becoming true through believing them. In the series Penglai, Chen transforms an ordinary bathroom into a surreal theatrical stage: golden branches emerge unexpectedly from the bathtub, interacting with a body covered in black pigment to suggest unnamed tensions surrounding identity. In another installation, Brave New World, driftwood collected from the shore and mirrored spheres create a stage where the sacred and the synthetic coexist, indicating a subtle but deliberate break from inherited beliefs, projected futures, and imposed identities.
Art is not concerned with describing “what has already happened” but with creating the possibility of perception itself. Chen offers no clear guidelines or classifiable visual systems. Instead, his practice highlights subtle interactions between bodily gestures and psychological flashbacks, objects that speak when language falters, and moments we might otherwise dismiss as meaningless—moments that gradually accumulate into something palpably felt. His work communicates a quiet sincerity—understated, unresolved, and unhurried by explanation.
Everything Was True For A Moment is not an exhibition that attempts to clarify or define; it is more like an ongoing puzzle. Within its misaligned fragments, quiet pathways emerge, leading toward a deeper interior. These works seek resonance rather than clarity, like seeing images through melody or hearing echoes in dreams. In such unstructured experiences, meaning momentarily touches down, establishing its own reason for existing.