NWS展览现场| 袁箫个展:允许脆弱

Allow Vulnerability

Starting from the vagus nerve, I focus on how those around me express anxiety and depression. A student once wrote in a sick note: “Teacher, I have bipolar disorder and may have episodes at any time… I’ve been feeling unwell recently and need to rest for a few days. I’m worried I won’t finish my piece — could the deadline be extended?” This is not an isolated case: beneath apparent tolerance lies the fact that more and more students and friends are struggling with depression and anxiety. I, too, once neglected bodily signals for too long and experienced a vagally mediated faint. My mind remained clear while my body collapsed uncontrollably. That bodily warning made me realise that emotions need a place to be held.

The body is highly sensitive; circadian rhythms, weather and other small environmental shifts all affect our neural sensing. When external stimulation exceeds an individual’s tolerance, the sympathetic nervous system may become overactive and the vagal regulation fail, precipitating anxiety or low mood. Contemporary life’s pursuit of the “perfect tool” has rendered people subject to standardising pressures. Prolonged inner exhaustion disrupts the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, impairing vagal function and causing emotions to manifest somatically.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea of an “impoverishment of experience”, we are undergoing a kind of communicative alienation: surface-level connection does not amount to genuine empathy. This spiritual distance can leave the amygdala — which governs fear and anxiety — in a state of prolonged activation, thereby suppressing the vagus nerve’s calming influence and creating a vicious cycle of emotional suppression and neural dysregulation. Psychologist Wang Fang’s call to “allow vulnerability” offers an ethical and practical route out of this loop: only by permitting vulnerability to be expressed and met, both individually and socially, can such imbalance be mended.

Eastern healing traditions point to complementary resources. Oysters, conch and mugwort are recorded in classical texts as having “cool, non-toxic” properties and have long been used to calm the mind and regulate qi. Alongside cognitive behavioural approaches and vagal regulation techniques, these soothing and restorative practices provide cultural and bodily channels for emotional recovery. In the studio I turn to glass as a handcrafted material: its slow phase change under heat, its hardening and its fragility render visible the coexistence of vulnerability and resilience. The transparency and reflectivity of glass, keen and responsive, can mirror the subtlest shifts in feeling.

This exhibition seeks to build a safe outlet for expression: to recognise and accept imperfection, and to let emotions be seen and understood. Attending to bodily warnings, restoring neural balance, and practising greater tolerance in social and interpersonal life are everyday ways of allowing vulnerability. May this place become somewhere vulnerability can rest and be treated with gentleness.