Qiao Zhang reflects on the exhibition she curated that seeks to touch our emotional being.
On August 22, 2025, Sensitive Beings opened at Docklands in Melbourne, gathering thirteen artists from five countries. Through the curator’s framing and articulation, the exhibition turns its attention to contemporary conditions of emotion and self-construction. It emerges from an acute sensitivity to both social observation and personal experience: emotion, though invoked constantly in daily life, remains one of the most elusive and least confronted aspects of existence. Do we truly need to manage it? The exhibition instead raises an open-ended question: might emotion be regarded as part of the body itself—not something to be dissolved or disciplined, but rather embraced as a natural extension of being?
Within today’s commercialised social context, individuals are often reduced to labels in the name of efficiency. We pursue what can be measured and verified—results, data, logic—while the intangible and shifting sphere of “emotion” becomes awkward, even suspect, within public discourse. Frequently cast as an uncontrollable variable, emotion is repressed, sidestepped, or marked with negativity.
Yet Sensitive Beings insists that emotion is not an expendable surplus but an inseparable part of our relationship to the world. Each time we avoid it—whether willingly or under pressure—the body drifts further from the inner life, leaving only a hollowed performance for society’s stage. Emotion is both an echo of perception and a sediment of experience. It shapes our understanding of the external world while preserving the hidden archive of our existence. Through it, the individual negotiates between reality and imagination, the concrete and the abstract, continually re-constructing their relation to the world.
Works reveal how emotions sculpt identity…
Here, emotion is repositioned at the very core of selfhood. Across painting, installation, and video, the exhibition presents not a single conclusion but an open dialogue. Works reveal how emotions sculpt identity, while returning agency to the viewer, inviting them to retrace their own affective histories, to touch the singular impressions and memories generated through living.
Rejecting the conventional neutrality of the “white cube,” Sensitive Beings unfolds within a T-shaped architecture that structures its narrative into two chapters: The Replicated Self and The Rewilded Sense. Space here does not merely host the works—it becomes part of the story, binding the viewer’s bodily movement to the curatorial logic.
The first chapter, The Replicated Self, confronts how the “Other”—whether stranger, kin, or an imagined double—misguides and disciplines emotional life. Chris Bowen’s interactive installation Mirror inaugurates the corridor: viewers’ bodies are fragmented into pixelated mosaics, projected onto a screen, their emotions dissolving into virtual ether. The narrow passage conspires with the works to pressurise the experience. Wu Jun’s Joy of Fish and N Series trace the bewilderment of navigating collective feeling; Yang Haojun’s Predicament cages a cluster of Wild Grass within rigid structures, embodying life constrained by social discipline; while Sharleen Cu’s In a Good Company questions whether surface-level harmony within groups requires the suppression of emotional truth. The corridor itself becomes a compressed threshold of emotion, where, under the gaze of the “Other,” visitors feel estranged from their own inner truth.
At its end, a door opens—like the narrow exit of a cave—signalling a narrative shift into the second chapter, The Rewilded Sense. The space suddenly expands, offering the body a renewed freedom to breathe. Lang Jiahong’s video Bohemian Rhapsody and Wang Heng’s macro-photography Multitudes of Dust stand at the threshold, functioning as pauses in time, preparing the ground for the emergence of inner truth. Opposite them, Zhang Yilin’s triptych—Angel’s Whisper, Firework Candy, Falling to Me—translates the wounds inflicted by the “Other” into lived, subjective experience. Their spiritual and irrational charge echoes the trauma introduced in The Replicated Self, yet reframes them in the language of healing.
Within the main gallery, rhythm and medium shift to form an emotional cartography. Frank James Meuschke’s photographic series points to the subtle ways emotion and the natural world intertwine, suggesting that even fleeting encounters with landscape can spark genuine affective states. In contrast, Li Qianxun’s Water Droplet Series, Lang Jiahong’s Null’s Lamp, and Han Bei’s Echo return to the intimacy of domestic settings—a rainy day at home, the quiet before sleep, the reverberations of the sea—capturing private registers of feeling.
The narrative eventually turns inward. Vivian Qiu’s Rice Sculpture Series, Marina Rodriguez’s Damade Night and Santa Lucia Flower, and Li Shiyin’s Bird of Paradise guide viewers into deeper self-inquiry: can our inner selves respond to emotion in its most unmediated form? And might this responsiveness be central to the question of who we are?
At the exhibition’s close, performance artist Feifei Liao reactivates the space. Through drumbeats, the scent of tea, and improvised movement, she conducts a meditative ritual, turning intangible sensation into corporeal language. Her performance is both conclusion and invocation—an embodied reminder of sensitivity as a mode of being.
When audiences finally leave Sensitive Beings, they emerge altered: more attuned to the complexity of self, and newly open to the possibility of re-weaving their bonds with the world. The exhibition is not merely a reflection on affect but a collective practice of transforming sensitivity into strength.
About Qiao Zhang
Qiao Zhang is an independent curator and the founder of the art exhibition organization Art Crossing. With a diverse international background, she has lived for extended periods in Melbourne, Suzhou, and London. Hercuratorial practice explores the relationships between contemporary art, society, emotion, and cultural identity. Through interdisciplinary and cross-cultural exchange, as well as public participation, she seeks to explore the sensory connections between art and everyday life. Her curated exhibitions have been presented in Australia, China, and the United Kingdom.
About ArtCrossing
ArtCrossing is an independent art collective founded by curators, designers, and artists. Its projects span visual arts, installation, and public experiences, fostering cross-cultural dialogue and long-term collaboration among creators from diverse backgrounds. The collective aims to bridge art and the public, creating inclusive and emotionally resonant encounters. Follow @artcrossing_
Other Team Members: Jiahui Tang, Lei Wang (Leila), Siyuan He, Xinyue Kang (Anita)
