Ragnhild Nes & GOES：Midsummer Night, When Time Suspends

In Nordic folk tales, Midsummer Night is a threshold where boundaries soften and the ordinary order of nature loosens—place seven different flowers beneath your pillow and the dream will reveal a future lover. That old ritual speaks to a wider proposition: under certain conditions linear time can be suspended, and memory and possibility converge in a single nocturnal flash.

This two-person exhibition by Chinese and Norwegian artists stages that suspension as a shared cognitive architecture. Works are arranged not as a chronological sequence but as a field in which past gestures, present fragments, and imagined futures cohabit. Objects and images are treated like found elements: cut, re-colored, layered and reassembled so that personal histories surface as palimpsests rather than narratives.

Ragnhild Nes 

Ragnhild Nes (b. 1993, Oslo, Norway) is a Norwegian visual artist working primarily within painting, alongside drawing and sculpture. She studied at Leeds Arts University and Westerdals Oslo ACT.

Her practice unfolds through abstraction, where colour, form, light, and poetry are layered with influences from surroundings, mythology, and art historical references. Nes approaches painting as an intuitive dialogue, beginning with writing on the blank canvas. Words transform into compositions and a visual language of colour, sometimes buried beneath paint and later resurfacing through titles, poems, or embroidered sentences over thick layers of paint.  Shaped by an awareness of light, nature, and seasonal change in her Norwegian upbringing, her practice reflects a sensitivity to shifting atmospheric conditions where colour and light are constantly evolving. Her sculptural work extends this painterly logic into three-dimensional form, where pieces emerge as continuations of the canvas, exploring materials such as metal, wood, and ceramics.

GOES

GOES (b. 1990), lives and works in Chengdu. He graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. In 2022, an accident at a music festival caused irreversible tinnitus, marking a turning point in his practice: his artistic language shifted from the high-contrast, sharp-edged energy of early graffiti to a more restrained, softer, meditative visual system. His work centers on the "transient emotions of memory," with irregular colored circles recurring as a signature visual grammar—recoloring memories faded by time. The original feelings transcend time and continue to shape who we are in the present. 

In 2015, GOES joined ABS CREW, one of Asia's top graffiti crews. He has represented China in youth art exchange programs in Italy, Croatia, Germany, and Japan, and has collaborated with international brands including CASIO, PUMA, and NIKE, serving as creative director on multiple occasions.