Venue:
Kyoto International Conference Center (ICC Kyoto), Kyoto, Japan

VIP Preview:
2026.11.06

Public Days:
2026.11.07–11.09

Read more on:
Art Collaboration Kyoto

MANGROVEGALLERY presents Our Fervor and Solitude, a solo project by Hou Yijie for the Kyoto Meetings section of ACK 2026.

The project is grounded in Hou’s engagement with Kyoto’s aesthetic sensibility. In Kyoto, temples and residences often stand side by side, where weathered surfaces and meticulously structured architecture generate a subtle yet vital tension. Gardens, pathways, and karesansui landscapes together compose a carefully orchestrated sensory order, whose vitality emerges through imperfection and interruption.

Hou Yijie’s practice dismantles history, legend, and reality into unstable fields of tension, seeking rupture within systems of order. Through layering, disruption, and interference, he foregrounds the inconsistencies and dissonances embedded in visual language. Rawness, recklessness, and imbalance form the core of his visual vocabulary. Hou’s artistic temperament stands in sharp contrast to Kyoto’s refinement, yet the two become inseparable counterparts: refinement and vulgarity, order and chaos together constitute the precise site of his intervention.

For this presentation, Hou has created a folding screen painting. Both an emblem of Eastern aesthetic traditions and a device for dividing space, the screen allows the artist to introduce disturbance into conventional modes of viewing, exploring how dissonance, roughness, and incompletion may coexist with stillness and harmony within a single visual experience.