ASSENZA di Yuval Avital – HE ART SPACE, Pechino, Cina

ASSENZA・不在场 by Yuval Avital
HE ART SPACE, Pechino, Cina
curated by Ran Tang
April 8th 2025 –  June 30th 2025

Featuring over 120 works across 1,250 square meters, ASSENZA・不在场 marks Yuval Avital’s first solo exhibition in China, inaugurating the brand-new contemporary art center HE ART SPACE in Beijing, founded by Ran Tang.  An immersive journey where absence becomes presence, emptiness transforms into tangible matter, and silence emerges as a universal language.

After two years of meticulous preparation, the first exhibition in China by artist Yuval Avital (Jerusalem, 1977), who lives and works between Milan and Salento, opens at HE ART SPACE in Beijing on Tuesday, April 8th, 2025.

Avital continues to push the boundaries of contemporary art with his unconventional approach and interdisciplinary practice. For this exhibition, Avital undertook a month-long residency in Beijing, transforming this unique cultural experience into numerous new works that include paintings, sound sculptures, installations, and performances. The site-specific creations form the core of ASSENZA・不在场 as they are rooted in the Chinese cultural context, embodying the artist’s personal mythology and interdisciplinary approach.

The exhibition features more than 120 works, including sound sculptures, paintings, photographs, installations and videos distributed in the new 1,000-square-meter HE ART SPACE space and a public installation in the long corridor of the Beijing ME Center creating an immersive path of more than 70 meters leading to the exhibition space.

This exhibition marks the first chapter of a larger project involving a collaboration between the artist and the curator that aims to produce and promote Avital’s work in China, fitting into a context of cultural and artistic exchange. With the support of BUILDING, the gallery that exclusively represents Avital, the project contributes to consolidating the artist’s presence on the international art scene.

The curator, Ran Tang, chose the term 不在场 to translate “ASSENZA,” a concept deeply rooted in Chinese thought. Unlike its Western counterpart-often associated with lack, loss, or emptiness-不在场 suggests an intentional withdrawal, a shift that generates meaning. The term recalls Daoist and Chan (Zen) traditions, where absence is not emptiness, but the space necessary for presence to emerge-a concept similar to 虚 (xū), the generative emptiness that enables transformation.

In this exhibition, Yuval Avital presents his artistic existence through a poetic paradox: both present and absent, deeply involved in reality but at the same time withdrawn into his personal cosmos. His artworks create connections between different cultures and times, elevating art to a symbolic language that transcends boundaries. Through different media, he creates a resonance between visions, sounds and spaces.

The public installation in the Beijing ME Center consisting of large hanging banners made of ramie, a natural fabric derived from the plant of the same name that has been produced in China for more than 5,000 years. Hand-dyed and painted with Chinese ink, these paintings delicately move through the air, transforming absence into a visible and tangible presence, creating a silent dialogue with the architecture of the place.

Within the exhibition space, Avital explores the relationship between light and shadow, presence and absence, through a series of lightboxes that use long-exposure photography to capture nature through light as a signature of movement and energy. From Impressionist nature, it transitions to the macrocosm created with a brand new sound sculpture, “Altar of Emptiness,” which brings into dialogue sound translations of black holes, a symbol of absolute emptiness along with Yunan’s small rattles.

Avital’s pictorial works, some made on traditional Chinese textiles and rice paper, evoke inner landscapes, absent spirits and symbolic figures that emerge from his inner world, far from the observed reality. These paintings are the result of research that oscillates between the figurative and the oneiric, between the intimate and the universal, offering a visual meditation on Avital’s invisible world, which unfolds in space inviting the viewer to take part of it.

ASSENZA・不在场 is also declined in the tension between human beings and nature, such as explored in the project Foreign Bodies (2017, 2019, 2022), which investigates, through photographs and videos, the alienation of humans in a sometimes indifferent or hostile natural world.
An intimate and transformative performance, Vocabulary of Absence, will take life, performed by performer Jingwen Yang. This performance explores recurring archetypes and symbols in Avital’s art, creating a continuous metamorphosis between body and void, presence and absence.

ASSENZA・不在场 is an invitation to reflect on what is absent, to shape the invisible, and to discover the power of what escapes perception