June 10 2025
As If Close: Fictions of Proximity
A 4C Gallery exhibition on intimacy, distance, and the fragile and constructed closeness
Featuring 4C Gallery Reporter Rachel Wang Editor Sally Han Design Meredith Whisman
Photo courtesy of 4C Gallery.
How do we define intimacy? Is it in the glance exchanged across a table, in the embrace shared between bodies, or in the rhythm of breath moving through touch?
As digital networks accelerate, distance collapses, time folds into itself. The ways we sense closeness fracture, reshape, and slip between the real and the virtual. Opening in early June, 4C Exhibition 2025 Q3: Fictions of Proximity invites audiences to explore how intimacy is shaped, sensed, and imagined within the overlapping spaces of contemporary art and virtual experience.
As a platform committed to supporting Chinese contemporary and conceptual art, 4C Gallery continues its mission to support emerging artists’ voices. For this exhibition, eight projects were selected through an open call, featuring the work of Crystal Yao, Hu Di, Liang Zhang, Lili Xie, Liu Chunxi, Susie Luo, Weiyu Xu, and Yian Xiang (listed alphabetically). Spanning moving images, sculpture, ceramics, and AI-generated forms, these works ask: how we take part in relationships—how we move toward others, how we stay, and how we drift apart. The exhibition does not propose a single definition of intimacy. Instead, the selected works offer a spectrum of approaches.
Veiled Well. Image courtesy of Crystal Yao.
Make a Friend and Have Hotpot. Image courtesy of Hu Di.
Soft Resistance. Image courtesy of Liang Zhang.
The Morning Wood Newspaper. Image courtesy of Lili Xie.
Some works speak of connections that are light and vibrant, shaped by communication, playfulness, and easy trust, while others trace bonds that are knotted and strained, marked by pull, release, and the weight of tension. However, intimacy does not always act positively to people. In some works, it becomes tinged with shame or with the experience of being secretly looked at, exposing a fragile and uneasy imbalance. Others adopt a satirical approach, laying bare the politics and power that underlie even the most ordinary human interactions. These expressions remind us that intimacy can also be fraught, discomforting, and even oppressive. Yet the object of proximity is not always bound to another person. Some works turn toward the spaces we inhabit, asking how we find belonging through sensation and form. Others reach into the natural world, imagining how different forms of life might recognize and respond to each other, expanding intimacy into an experience that moves across human and nonhuman boundaries.
人面兽心. Image courtesy of Chunxi Liu.
Untitled Triptych. Image courtesy of Susie Luo.
Synthetic Iceberg. Image courtesy of Weiyu Xu.
拉扯. Image courtesy of Yian Xiang.
For curators from 4C Gallery, the exhibition offers a central question: “In an age where visual culture and digital reality twist into each other, how do individuals and relationships shape each other in the search for presence and belonging in a world where the real and unreal blur?”
Another thread of the exhibition explores how intimacy takes on material form. It is no longer limited to soft or sentimental forms, but emerges through concrete bricks, ceramic earth, and the logic of machine learning. The viewer is no longer a distant observer. Instead, they might flip through a newspaper, knead a piece of clay, or rearrange a stack of boxes. Through interaction, they participate in shaping relationships, forming brief yet precious moments of contact with the works—and with the minds behind them.
As technology and media continue to evolve, how might we redefine what it means to be close?
Does intimacy still rely on emotional exchange between humans?
Can virtual intelligence, recorded images, or artificial skin carry a sense of closeness?
Can the other in a relationship be simulated, constructed, or projected onto something nonhuman?
And conversely, within the most simple and familiar forms of proximity, do we still find control, expectation, or moral frameworks at play?
At one end of the relationship, what do you gain, and what must we cost?
What draws close may be constructed. What remains distant may already belong to you. Fictions of Proximity leaves an unclaimed position, about where you stand.
Photo courtesy of 4C Gallery.
Featuring 4C Gallery Reporter Rachel Wang Editor Sally Han Design Meredith Whisman
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