Escaping an Objectified World: Constructing Immanence in Contemporary Art

In 2025, we find ourselves in a world fractured by a global public health crisis. What followed were waves of ideological clashes, geopolitical conflicts, and trade and economic disputes. It is hard to tell which catastrophe is worse. Although participation in public life is a necessary and urgent political action, many artists have instinctively chosen to detach from this reality and retreat to a space of immanence, where meaning is drawn from internal experiences rather than external influences. This inward turn responds to the increasingly chaotic and ineffective frameworks of knowledge and moral standards. It is not an escape, but a way of treating the world as something that can be rejected or distanced from.^[1] By stepping outside dominant frameworks, artists can contemplate and reconstruct their selfhood and the integrity of their thoughts and feelings.

Contemporary art opens up many pathways to explore the self and society. This essay analyses three key motivations that shape artistic responses to crisis: the urge to narrate personal history, confronting shame, and the act of making kin—an intentional act of forming relationships. Through these perspectives, we can consider how artists respond to crises in public life and reflect on the complexities of their time.

Narrating Personal History

Selfhood resembles a piece of writing that requires footnotes. It is an ongoing construction because ‘one is always in arrears to oneself’.^[2] Narrating the self and personal history is crucial to the process of self-explanation and self-building. Acts of introspection and the search for personal coordinates within the broader timeline of history are vital to shaping individual subjectivity. If the mission of poets and historians is to preserve the narratives of events, then that of artists is to ground personal narration in a universal foundation that fosters collective empathy through subjective and affective methods of expression.

Heidi Lau devotes time and labour to craft structurally intricate and mysterious ceramic sculptures. Her process is both an act of mourning for her late mother and a unique way to memorialise Macau’s architectural ruins and historical relics. In Lau’s concept, clay is more than a medium that conveys information. It is a vessel for her to converse spiritually with her mother and hometown, a conduit for laying out the narrative. By creating art through physical forms, Lau’s works transcend linear history and create an alternate space and time. In a similar vein, artist Ma Qiusha’s No. 52 Liulichang East Street (2023) taps into the narrative function of objects to address the complexities of personal history. She builds a fantastical space reminiscent of an antique shop window, filling it with objects and images that are difficult to authenticate. In the multiplied refractions between glass and mirror, an ambiguous family history and unrecognisable personal identity shimmer into view. Her use of appropriation, reorganisation, and collage creates a hidden narrative that slips between historical truth and imagination, becoming a micro-drama that reflects her origins.

Combining history with personal history into a multi-layered narrative is a device in Zhuang Hui’s solo exhibition The Journey of an Autodidact (2023). Zhuang alternates between archival materials, historical documents, art history data, and his own art to outline sixty years of lived experience, from teaching himself to paint to life as an artist. He sets 1963 (the year of his birth) and 2023 (the year he reaches sixty) as narrative anchor-points. These are moments when China endured, respectively, three years of the great famine and the COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting the sorrowful tone of a crisis survivor, Zhuang uses himself as a point of reference, seeking to make individual experience resonate with the grand narrative of history, while subtly reflecting on the cyclical nature of historical processes.

Recounting personal history can be an effective way of recovering continuity in collective time, bridging historical ruptures and constructing diverse narratives from fragmented memories. It is at once an attempt to approach the grand history through individual experience as much as it is a sustained act of resistance against it. Once the process of building selfhood is completed, personal history gives narration a genuine historicity.

Confronting Shame

As cultural conflict intensifies and moral order crumbles, there is a growing need to articulate psychological experience of affect. Among these emotional states, shame stands out as a profound and complex affect mechanism that connects with such concepts as desire, values, the gaze of the other, and power. It also serves as a mediating function between self-awareness and social validation. Shame is a by-product of the contradiction and dialogue between the self and the ‘internalised other’. It represents social control and power relationships manifested as affect.^[3] Confronting shame has important implications in exploring the spiritual dilemma of contemporary society, and it is a common entry point for artists striving to elucidate the relationship between individual behaviour and society.

Wong Ping’s animations combine vivid depictions of sexual desire with dystopian tales of loneliness and misery, all rooted in human nature. His first-person narration reveals erotic secrets and private moments as if no one is listening. Viewers may feel bewildered or even disoriented at his interludes about impotence, the anus, and earwax. Such uninhabited expression is both a daring disregard for the gaze of others and a resolute counterattack. Unlike Wong, who uses narration to evoke viewers’ sense of shame, artist Wang Ximan interrogates this emotion through her own body. Having lost her left leg in a car accident over a decade ago, she exposes her disability in her performance works, executing postures that test her physical limits. Though immobilised in one dimension, her body demonstrates extraordinary capabilities in another. She hurls the ball of shame over physical disability back at her viewers and questions whether flawless, perfectly functional bodies exist. Clearly, being incapacitated is not an absolute option or state—any body can suffer from a lack of or momentary breakdown.

Beyond physical wounds, trauma in the collective memory can also trigger indescribable shame. Artist Zhang Peili’s video work Portrait of 2024 (2024) projects the faces of individuals held in an interrogation room onto a large display wall. A blinding ray of light suddenly penetrates the darkness, revealing expressions of confusion, struggle, and bewilderment. Zhang’s work hints at the pain and repression COVID-19 inflicted on the collective experience. This echoes Satre’s belief that shame originates from ‘recognising that I am, indeed, the object of the Other’s gaze and judgement’.^[4] By magnifying these facial expressions, he exposes how shame, unease, fear, pain, and other complex emotions emerge during moments of surveillance. In doing so, personal emotions become legible to others, fostering a sense of collective empathy. This moves the discussion on shame beyond individual perception, transforming it into a critical social proposition.

Making Kin

While exploring immanence, artists do more than just isolate themselves. In fact, many engage in an unrelenting search for the possibility of making kin^[5] and creating space to build kinship. Not only does this search help mend increasingly divided social networks, but it also offers an opportunity for artists to rebuild their identities and realise spiritual continuity in a fragmented world.

In contemporary art, making kin first manifests as a creative method. In Pan Daijing’s performances, she combines metal, plaster, charcoal, water, and synthesiser as mediums of interaction and bonding between visitors, materials, and spaces. Touch is also a crucial aspect of displaying musicality while performance is meant to trigger different tactile sensory systems. For example, when a dancer’s fingers touch the audience, ‘music’ begins. Through this approach, Pan explores the actual and figurative bonds that bring people together. Similarly, for Shen Xin, making art is not a production process. Rather, it forms connections and provides a space for creating kinship, where every artwork builds rapport with the affect and perception of its viewers throughout its lifespan. Many of Shen’s works explore how language and words can breathe new life into land-related local cultures, and how these cultural forms are reawakened through art.

Additionally, the ties of kinship can be formed through interpersonal communication. This is exemplified in the friendship between artists Li Ran and Zheng Haozhong, formed during the pandemic. At the time, Zheng regarded his studio as a cage, an externalised self. Day after day, he painted windows, railings, and the scenery outside, as if he were sketching a portrait of himself. Meanwhile, Li immersed himself in political cartoons of 1930s China and the language of European symbolist paintings, seeking to align himself with the spiritual mindset and life choices of intellectuals of those eras, as if they were living in a parallel universe to his own. Despite their different painting practices, Zheng and Li maintained frequent communication for three years, supporting each other through challenges brought on by COVID-19 and exchanging ideas on creative concepts for future explorations.^[6]

Beyond interpersonal bonds, artists also explore how spatial relationships between people and the city can foster a sense of kinship. In recent years, Bi Rongrong has been observing and acquiring patterns from urban environments as part of her creative practice. Through this process, she gradually realises that urban elements such as architectural patterns, street lights, the texture of asphalt, and the gaps between leaves are linked in a way that helps each other grow, just as plants do. She explores different ways of using arts and crafts and the expressiveness of materials in her work, weaving patterns into a myriad of symbols. For Bi, weaving is a method and a language. It is also an experiment that connects disparate visual elements. In contrast, Tan Yingjie’s performance installation When the Things Come to Us (2025) depicts his recent experience of regularly commuting to the outskirts of the city he lives in, creating a sense of superficiality and disassociation. Translating this experience into the work, a performer folds and connects thick, massive aluminium plates like sheets of paper, forming a generic urbanscape with no history.

By narrating the self, contemporary artists can approach a grander history. By confronting their perspectives, their art can evoke collective empathy. And by building connections, they can build a foundation for consensus. In this unique and complex era, artists retreat into their inner worlds to develop immanence from multiple dimensions—time, affect, and relationships. Whether it is through personal history, shame, or kinship, their practices offer us new ways of searching for possibilities amid the challenges of our time.