On Soft Paws

11.07. - 26.07.2025

Himanshi Goyal, Tuangsap Tasawang & Zexuan Liu

The hidden, the fleeting, are in constant transformation:
just like us and our dreams, which are usually forgotten soon after waking and, if remembered at all, remain only as vague traces in our memory.
These traces blur on images and screens.

Transience, transformation, and the tension between control and letting go connect the artistic works of Himanshi Goyal, Tuangsap Tasawang, and Zexuan Liu. Mythical creatures, (domestic) animals, and natural processes serve as symbolic representations of blurred memories and quiet interactions at the core of the artist's work. They reflect the ephemerality of the moment and the fragile nature of memories that come and go.

With gentle, soft steps we move together through the exhibition space, a collaboratively created dream world that maps and opens access to hidden and shadowy realms, as well as to various materialities. A curtain runs through the space, one that can be drawn aside or closed again, like the gesture of falling asleep or slowly waking up. It can mark the transition between day and night, consciousness and the subconscious, or dream and daily life.

The opening of the exhibition On Soft Paws will take place on July 11 at 7 PM at Braubachstraße 37 (fffriedrich). We are looking forward to celebrate the opening with bubbles and cotton candy.

Curators: Franka Marlene Schlupp & Frederike Antonia Ohnewald
Posterdesign: Leonard Becker

Zexuan Liu’s paintings explore the subtle states, those invisible yet deeply felt forces in daily life, such as memories, moods, and dreams. His works reflects a curiosity for moments that seem ordinary at first glance, yet reveal a sense of strangeness or hidden meaning when observed more closely.

In ‚Nymph‘, he reconstructs a real landscape at the foot of the Taunus Mountains, a secret place surrounded by high-end residential areas and hiking camps. Though not deliberately concealed, the site feels secretive, one must push aside a few branches to find it. The scene evokes the imagined dwelling of a forest spirit, suspended between the natural and the artificial, the seen and the veiled.

Liu’s imagery moves between the real and the dreamlike, the visible and the veiled. A tiger cub, based on a preserved specimen, hovers between life and death, presence and absence. It occurs as tender, powerful, and unknowable. Like a memory or a dream, it resists clear interpretation and becomes a symbolic carrier of energy and vulnerability.

His work invites viewers into a space of transformation, where ordinary moments become charged with quiet mystery and the familiar takes on a strange, symbolic presence. What begins as a landscape or an animal becomes a threshold between inner and outer worlds.

Tuangsap Tasawang explores memory as a fragmented and shifting process. His figures never appear as a whole; they are composed of parts, like memories that return only in pieces.
Painted on fabric made from recycled PET bottles, the material evokes a pixelated surface: once clear, once blurred. It can also be seen as speaking of the past, of what has been discarded, and of what may remain. At certain points, transparent tapes run across the surface, adding another formal layer to the picture plane – somewhere between fixation and fragment.

Animals in Tuangsap’s work symbolize movement, instinct, and a form of natural rhythm. In general, forms emerge, transform, and are held in a constant tension between structure and freedom. Both the image and the material are in constant motion, therefore nothing is fixed; everything is in process.

His artistic practice moves between control and spontaneity, where constructed structures are enabled to meet self-organizing processes.

A: I met a gluttonous rat yesterday.

B: Yesterday, or a lifetime ago. Hard to tell.

A: It was eating from my bowl.

B: Bold.

A: It didn’t even look at me.

B: Or maybe it did.

A: Do you think it remembers?

B: Maybe. Maybe it’s looking at us right now.

A: I can’t see anything.

B: Doesn’t mean it’s not there.

A: I heard the hunger swallowed him in the end.

B: He’s still finding his way back – slow and swollen.

A: Should we wait a little longer?

B: Perhaps.

(They remain still. One cat’s eyes flick toward the edge of the frame. The other stares into the quiet. Nothing moves.)

Himanshi Goyal’s work explores the human impulse to read meaning and narrative into beings beyond existing frameworks. In ‚First wait, last wait‘, an elusive exchange takes place, its words dissolving into ambiguity.

Within this uncertain space, the boundary between perception and imagination dissolves. Goyal’s work does not aim to uncover meaning, but rather to explore how we impose it. It becomes a site of negotiation — where our projections collide with the independent reality of the beings within, revealing the fragility of the narratives we construct.

DE
Das Verborgene, das Flüchtige, befinden sich im stetigen Wandel: wie wir und unsere Träume, die nach dem Aufwachen meist schon wieder vergessen sind und, wenn überhaupt, nur schemenhaft in unseren Erinnerungen bleiben. Diese verwischen auf Bildern und Bildschirmen.

Vergänglichkeit, Wandlung und das Spannungsfeld zwischen Kontrolle und Loslassen verbinden die künstlerischen Arbeiten von Himanshi Goyal, Tuangsap Tasawang und Zexuan Liu. Dabei stehen Fabelwesen, (Haus-)Tiere und natürliche Prozesse als stellvertretende Symbole für verschwommene Erinnerungen und leise Interaktionen im Zentrum ihrer Arbeiten. Sie spiegeln das Flüchtige des Moments und die fragile Beschaffenheit von Erinnerungen, die kommen und gehen, wider.

Auf leichten Schritten bewegen wir uns gemeinsam durch den Ausstellungsraum, eine gemeinschaftlich kreierte Traumwelt, die Zugänge zu verborgenen und schemenhaften Welten sowie zu verschiedenen Materialitäten abbildet und öffnet.

Die Eröffnung der Ausstellung On Soft Paws findet am 11. Juli um 19 Uhr in der Braubachstraße 37 (fffriedrich) statt. Wir freuen uns auf ein gemeinsames Opening mit Sekt und Zuckerwatte!

Kuratorinnen: Franka Marlene Schlupp & Frederike Antonia Ohnewald

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