展览回顾及展评三则 - 庙宇与波:习关磊

《庙宇与波》展览现场

SOOFA (上海) ，2026年

《庙宇与波》展览现场

SOOFA (上海) ，2026年

有一些艺术作品服务于视觉。还有一些作品，则以一种更安静、也更深层的方式发生作用——它们绕过视网膜与理智，抵达某种更古老的感知。习关磊的作品属于后者。

我第一次接触他的创作时，像是在自然中偶然遭遇某种事物：并未真正有所准备。那里没有宏大的姿态，没有纪念碑式的尺度，也没有任何试图令人惊叹的企图。然而，某种东西让我停下了脚步。纸张表面的质地、痕迹停留于其上的方式、材料内部所隐约携带的时间感，都使人无法轻易离开。我停留得比预想更久，也一次次重新返回。

习关磊于1994年出生于中国大理，而这一“源头”之所以重要，并不在于传记意义，而更像一种感知的形成。大理的山、水、岩石，以及长期被自然塑造的地貌经验，在语言之前，便已决定了一个人与世界发生关系的方式。这种感知始终存在于他的作品内部，并成为其创作的根基。

There are works of art that seduce the eye. And then there are works that do something quieter and more unsettling — they reach somewhere deeper, past the retina and past the intellect, into a place that feels older than both. Xiguan Lei's work belongs to the second kind.

I first encountered his practice the way you encounter certain things in nature: without quite being prepared for it. There was no grand gesture, no monumental scale, no obvious invitation to be impressed. And yet something stopped me. Something in the texture of the paper, in the way a mark sat on a surface, in the particular weight of materials that seemed to carry memory inside them. I stayed longer than I expected. I kept returning.

Xiguan Lei was born in Dali, China, in 1994, and that origin matters — not as biography, but as formation. Dali is a place defined by its landscape: mountains, water, ancient stone, the kind of natural environment that shapes a person's relationship with the world before language does. That sensibility never left his work. It is its foundation.

无论是雕塑、绘画，还是某种拒绝被既定媒介定义的存在，他的创作始终从有机材料中生长而出：树叶、树皮、苔藓、石头，以及那些仍然保留植物纤维痕迹的手工纸。这些材料并非因其视觉美感而被选择，而是因为它们本身便携带着时间、过程，以及自然系统自身的运行逻辑。

尤其是那些纸张，会令人产生一种近乎本能的触觉冲动。并非出于好奇，而更像一种辨认——仿佛材料自身正在诉说其来处，而身体比意识更早理解这一切。

这些年来，习关磊创作中最明显的变化，是他对于“留白”与“未完成”的信任。早期作品虽然已经极其克制，却偶尔仍会朝向某种完整性：一个趋于封闭的构图，或某种试图解释自身的痕迹。而如今，他越来越拒绝这种“完成”。作品不再导向结论，而是保持开放；它给予得更少，却要求观者付出更多——更多耐心、更多停驻，以及与那些无法立即显现之物共处的能力。

在一个不断奖励“可读性”与“奇观化”的艺术世界中，维持这种状态并不容易。而习关磊却愈发坚定地如此实践。这种成熟，与年龄无关，而更接近一种长期的自我确认。他的创作本质上始终关乎“倾听”——倾听材料、倾听土地，也倾听自然世界自身的逻辑，而非市场的逻辑。

What he makes — whether sculpture, painting, or something that refuses both categories — emerges from organic materials: leaves, bark, moss, stone, handmade paper with the memory of plant fibers still visible in its surface. These are not chosen for their visual appeal. They are chosen because they carry something. Time. Process. The logic of natural systems that operate without human instruction.

His paper, in particular, does something I find difficult to describe without resorting to the physical: you want to touch it. Not out of curiosity, but out of recognition — as though the material is communicating something about where it came from, and your hands understand before your mind does.

What has evolved most visibly in Xiguan's practice over time is his confidence in absence. Earlier works, while already deeply considered, occasionally gestured toward resolution — a composition that closed, a mark that explained itself. Increasingly, his work resists this. It opens instead of concluding. It offers less and demands more — more patience, more stillness, more willingness to sit with something that does not immediately yield.

This is a difficult thing to sustain in an art world that rewards legibility and spectacle. That he does so with increasing conviction speaks to a maturity that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with commitment to a practice that is, at its core, about listening. To materials. To place. To the logic of the natural world rather than the logic of the market.

“源”作为一种深层连接

习关磊作品中最打动人的地方，在于其中的一切都来自某种真实的经验。它并非诞生于工作室中的概念推演，而更像一种长期贴近土地的生活方式所自然生成的结果。那些根系同时具有地理性、个人性与物质性，并最终共同汇入作品内部。

有一种美，并不会主动宣告自身。它只是缓慢积累，如同某些风景，唯有当人真正走入其中之后，才逐渐显露其深度。习关磊的作品正以这样的方式存在。它值得反复观看，也会随着光线、观看状态，以及人的注意力变化而不断改变。

它所建立的连接，首先并非审美性的，而更接近某种原初经验——一种关于“来源”的身体性辨认。人、树叶、石头，以及树皮缓慢腐朽的过程，原本便来自同一个地方。而习关磊并不试图论证这一点，他只是以一种异常温和、也异常坚定的方式，让这种联系自然浮现。

或许，这正是他最重要的地方：并非某一件具体作品，而是一种持续展开的创作实践——一种关于艺术、自然与身体并非彼此分离，而始终处于同一连续运动之中的实践。如果你愿意在他的作品前停留足够久，便能够感受到这一点。

Origin as the Deepest Form of Connection

What moves me most about Xiguan's work — and I use that word deliberately, because this is not an intellectual response but a physical one — is the sense that everything in it comes from somewhere real. Not from a concept developed in a studio, but from a life lived in proximity to the land, from roots that are geographical and personal and material all at once.

There is a particular kind of beauty that does not announce itself. It accumulates instead, quietly, the way certain landscapes only reveal their depth after you have walked inside them for a while. Xiguan Lei's work operates this way. It rewards return. It changes depending on the light, on your own state of attention, on how much you are willing to slow down.

The connection it creates is not aesthetic first. It is something more primary — a recognition, almost cellular, of origin. Of the fact that we come from the same place as leaves and stones and the slow decomposition of bark. His work does not argue this. It simply demonstrates it, with extraordinary gentleness and extraordinary conviction.

That, finally, is what I would call his greatest achievement: not any single work, but the sustained proposition, enacted across an evolving practice, that art and nature and the human body are not three separate things. They are one continuous movement. And if you stand still long enough in front of his work, you can feel it.

一场跨越时间的对话：习关磊与马蒂斯

在亨利·马蒂斯晚年的创作中，有一个极为重要的转折：当疾病使他无法再以传统方式绘画时，他拿起剪刀，开始剪纸。那些晚年的彩色剪纸作品，是其创作生涯中最自由、也最激进的部分之一。但真正动人的，并不仅仅是色彩与形式，而是其中残留的“触感”——手部施加于纸面的压力、瞬间完成的判断，以及犹豫与确信如何同时存在于同一道边缘之中。纸张承载了这一切。

习关磊的创作来自另一种环境：更冷静、更内向，也更深地扎根于自然，而非地中海式的光线。但两者之间依然存在某种隐秘的亲缘关系。他们都意识到，材料从来不是被动的。纸张也并非中性的媒介，而是一种拥有自身历史、阻力与记忆的“活物”。

如果说马蒂斯是在将色彩压入纸张，那么习关磊则更像是在将“时间”压入纸张之中——树木的时间、双手的时间，以及风景在漫长岁月中被缓慢吸收的时间。

因此，最终留存在表面的，便不再仅仅是一幅图像，而更像一种“存在”的痕迹：某个人曾在这里，触碰过某物，并留下的不是签名，而是一场尚未结束的对话。

A Conversation Across Time: Xiguan Lei and Matisse

There is a moment in Henri Matisse's late practice — bedridden, unable to paint in the traditional sense — where he did something that changed everything: he picked up scissors and began to cut. The gouaches découpées, those luminous paper cutouts made in the final years of his life, are among the most joyful and radical things he ever produced. But what is often overlooked is not the color or the form — it is the touch. In those cutouts, you can feel the pressure of his hand, the decision made in real time, the hesitation and the certainty living side by side in a single edge. The paper carried him.

Xiguan Lei works from a different place — colder, more interior, rooted in the natural world rather than the Mediterranean light — but there is a kinship worth noting. Both artists understood that the material is not passive. That paper is not a neutral surface but a living thing with its own history, its own resistance, its own way of holding a mark. Where Matisse pressed color into paper with the confidence of a man who had spent a lifetime learning to see, Xiguan presses time into paper — the time of the tree, the time of the hand, the time of a landscape absorbed slowly over years.

And in both cases, what remains on the surface is not simply an image. It is evidence of a presence. A trace of someone who was there, who touched something, and left behind not a signature but a conversation.