Intimacy is not soft; it is an ongoing dialectic—oscillating between closeness and detachment, gazing and evasion, symbiosis and fissure. 

In an era of accelerated public sentiment and fragmented relational structures, “intimacy” has transcended its role as a tender term confined to the private sphere. It has instead become a social mechanism that permeates the body, technology, family, culture, and power. Emotional studies, feminism, and multi-species theory collectively reveal that intimacy extends far beyond emotional expression; it constitutes a structural experience—disciplined, recorded, expected, and desired.

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Chronicles of Intimacy thus adopts the ‘fable’ as its core methodology: not as fiction, but as a means to reveal reality through symbolism, metaphor, and rupture. Bringing together 29 artists from across the globe, the exhibition collectively forms an unfinished book of intimacy. Through fragmented narratives, bodily language, material archaeology, and affective writing, the works present intimacy's multiple dimensions: love, power, the body, trauma, memory, and multispecies relations.

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Ⅰ. Intimate Scars: Power, Control and the Fissures in Relationships
Yuna Ding's “Love to Fish” employs the allegory of “loving fish” to reveal the dual structure of care and control: when love becomes possession, the other becomes a malleable object. “In Mama Horse”, Qingyu Zheng re-enacts humiliation, desire and self-boundaries through performance footage of licking iron railings. Najme Kazazi's abstract paintings document emotions silenced by societal norms. Chen Ren's “The Self-Immolation” and “The Unmaidened” present the body as a vessel for industrial trauma, revealing the destructive nature of intimacy.

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Ⅱ. Rituals of Feminine Intimacy: Body, Family, and Generational Memory
Jingjing Xu's “Under the Veil” depicts women’s cyclical struggle between culture and desire, where the veil becomes a dual burden upon both spirit and flesh. Fanglin Luo's pink garment painting “Pink is nostalgia to the womb” traces the warmth and attachment of the womb as the primal space of intimacy. Vera da Costa constructs a mourning ritual in “Pietà of Sorrow”, where intimacy becomes a vessel for collective grief.

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Ⅲ. Ecological Intimacy: Symbiotic Relationships Between Human and Non-Human
Yvette Yujie Yang's botanical imagery presents ecological rupture through a “transparent” lens—the disappearance of intimacy itself becomes a form of mourning. Manze Guo depicts the persistent “misplaced closeness” within the cityscape in Vacuum. Valeria Solari's Ocean Veil juxtaposes marine ecology with the female form, revealing cross-species perceptual connections.

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Ⅳ. Iconography of Intimacy: Memory, Time and Emotional Residues
Caijing Kuang's diptych print “Distance of Memory” employs ghosting and displacement to depict memory's ‘distance-proximity-distance’ cycle. Suella Wynne's stitched imagery mends childhood wounds. Valeriia Burliuk's “Spring” employs natural growth to symbolise the courage of rebirth. Alena Saakian's video diary, “Your Words Are Like Kisses on the Forehead ”chronicles the disappearance, reconfiguration, and reverberation of emotions over a year.

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V. Intimate Fictions: The Reconstruction of Identity, Fantasy and Emotion
Shenlu Liu's energy node textiles symbolise pathways between the physical and spiritual. Jianjian Zixi Liu weaves personal myths from urban conduits and bodily experiences. Lou Croff Blake & Madelyn Byrd's “A Tuned Body ”explores the possibility of “becoming multiple bodies” through bodily frequency tuning. Dora Siafla reconstructs queer community's secret codes through virtual violets.

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VI. Rewriting Intimacy: Future Visions of Emotional Structures
Martina Licalsi's cyanotype work “Conoscerti” explores the impossibility of understanding others. Julieta Tetelbaum presents the resilience and solitude of older queer women in “JOY”. Ylenia-Gaia Dotti rewrites the symbolic structures of female trauma through psychoanalysis and fairy tales. Pante’A Rezaei renders bodily entanglements in Iranian mythology as evidence of fluid identity. Valentina Sepúlveda documents the persistence of emotions across time and space through cyanotype. Fù Miàn portrays the oscillation of female identity between concealment and revelation through red veils and dance.
*(The above are brief introductions to selected artists' works)

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The Intimate Fables presents the complexity of contemporary intimate experiences through cross-media practice. The work reveals how intimacy is constructed, fractured, desired, and rewritten within the realms of the body, relationships, history, technology, and the environment. Employing an allegorical structure, the exhibition enables individual emotions and social mechanisms to mutually illuminate one another within visual language, offering new perspectives and spaces for discussion on topics such as gender, emotional labour, bodily politics, and multi-species relationships.

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This exhibition aims to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue among the public, artists, and academia. We invite viewers to collectively enter this “unfinished book of intimacy” through observation, reflection, and participation, continuing to write their own chapters within it.