Duo Exhibition: "The Exotic Gaze and Illusory Reflections" — A Cross-Cultural Dialogue Between Miguel Soler-Roig & Sun Jing
Mianbu

Duo Exhibition: The Exotic Gaze and Illusory Reflections — A Cross-Cultural Dialogue Between Miguel Soler-Roig and Sun Jing.

This exhibition constructs a transcultural narrative through the dual perspectives of Spanish explorer-photographer Miguel Soler-Roig (hereafter Miguel) and Chinese-American artist Sun Jing. By juxtaposing their photography, painting, and installation works, it interrogates the reinterpretation and reconstruction of Self, Nature, and Art History across divergent cultural frameworks, forging a dialogue that transcends temporal and spatial boundaries.

Symphony in Temporal-Spatial Folds: A Tripartite Dialogue

1. Miguel's Geological Poetics: Frida's Rebirth Between Beauty and Pain
Miguel's lens excavates Mexico's volcanic terrains and colonial ruins through a geological poetics — his photographs layer indigenous symbols (pre-Columbian glyphs), colonial architecture fractures, and Frida Kahlo's iconic pain-portraits. In the Frida Reborn series, models adorned with cracked porcelain makeup embody the Nahua concept of Nepantla (in-betweenness), where beauty emerges from the collision of Mesoamerican earth pigments and European oil painting techniques. The scars of history are rendered as living topographies.

2. Sun Jing's Landscape Poetics: Frida's Displaced Self-Reflexivity
Sun Jing's practice, rooted in Song Dynasty ink-wash philosophy, reconfigures Frida's self-portraiture through diasporic dislocation. Her Frida in Cyberspace series superimposes Frida's floral crowns onto AI-generated Song landscapes, while her body becomes a wandering brushstroke dissolving into pixelated mist. This schizophrenic gaze — simultaneously Frida's defiant stare and the detached perspective of Wang Ximeng's A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains — critiques the commodification of cultural identity in globalized art systems.

3. Spatial Poetics and Anthropological Vision in Gallery 3
The final space deploys immersive installation to materialize the gaze-exchange:

- Miguel's Lava Codex (basalt slabs etched with Nahuatl poetry) encircles Sun Jing's Fragmented Li (resin cubes embedding Song ceramic shards and Pittsburgh steel dust).

- A mirrored floor reflects both artists' works, generating infinite cultural parallax — a visual metaphor for Homi Bhabha's Third Space theory, where meaning is negotiated through hybridity rather than binary opposition.

Miguel Soler-Roig is a multidisciplinary artist who focuses his practice on photography, widening its limits beyond the medium itself. The expansion of techniques, strategies and formats is perceived in the analysis of his trajectory, of great conceptual coherence, but always open to transformation. In his more than twenty years of artistic career, his work has evolved and grown in parallel to his life experiences, but preserving, at all times, a modus operandi that curator Oliver Orest Tschirky defines as conceptual and perfectionist. “Following his thoughts and beliefs, he carefully selects, elaborates and develops the concepts of his photographic series. His aim as a photographer

is not so much to seek the decisive moment as to work out a conceptual basis and sophisticated compositions. With his images he delves into the ideas behind things, focusing his attention on the awareness of life (...).” Among the most successful projects are “The ruin of memory”, “Out of Silence”, “Marfa Lights” or the recent “In the Navel of the Moon”, exhibited until September at Casa de México (Madrid) as part of  thePhotoEspaña 2024 Festival. All of them involve a journey, a testing of the artist’s own boundaries, who launches himself into the adventure of exploring other territories and getting socially involved in them.

In the proposal for Being 3 gallery, Miguel Soler-Roig puts In the Navel of the Moon in dialogue with Frida, series linked by the Mexican context and the union of temporalities.

The project In the Navel of the Moon brings together landscape photographs taken in Mexico over a period of more than 30 years and produced for the first time for Photo España 2024. The images mix the beginning and the present of the artist relationship with the country through digital collages, expressing the emotional density within

them. He recovers the Nahuatl term of Mexico to generate subtle links between the mythical etymology of the territory and the character of his own vital milestones. The name comes from the union of three words -metztli (moon), xictli (navel) and co (place)- and responds to the similarity between the shape of the ancient lakes of the

valley of Mexico and the silhouette of the lunar spots seen from the earth. These references place us in a symbolic key related to the moon and water and, therefore, to emotions, the past and the subconscious, fundamental in this series. The digital collages come from slides of his first trip in 1986, was still a graduate student at Rhode Island School of Design. The images reflect the irregular succession of stages in Mexico through various intensities and juxtaposed elements. They all start from an ancient record of archaeological ruins and are layered, like a palimpsest, with liquid resources and private photographs linked to a memory. Each composition is a compendium of crossed experiences anchored in a past time. The enclaves are located, with the exception of the Popocatépetl volcano, in the Yucatan Peninsula: the Tulum Castle, the monuments of Uxmal and the summit of the temple of Kukulcán in Chichén Itzá (Mayan version of the feathered serpent or Quetzalcóatl)

The Frida series explores the personality of the mythical Mexican artist before the accident that marked her life and led her to dedicate herself professionally and unconditionally to painting. The photographs are a tribute to her figure while portraying a young Frida (performed by a model) around the year 1925, exactly 100 years ago, free

of conceptual and physical corsets. Born in Coyoacán in 1907, in a middle-class family, she was a girl full of energy, intelligence, curiosity and passion for life. She had a strong, independent character and a vibrant personality, and from her teenage years, she was known for her unique style and fashion sense, which included traditional Mexican

clothing and a personal touch that reflected her cultural identity. The project emphasizes all these qualities through the aesthetics, the pose, the clothing and the firmness of her

gaze. In her eyes we can guess the determination of an artist destined to become an international reference. However, the images refer to a previous period in which Frida had just begun her artistic apprenticeship in the engraving workshop of Fernando Fernández Domínguez, a friend of her father’s who had detected special gifts in

her. From her childhood home in Coyoacán, the 18-year-old Frida Kahlo observed the world around her, drawing the faces of her sisters, the expressions of her mother and the curves of the bougainvillea that covered the walls of the Casa Azul, depicted in the photographs. Around that time, Frida was attracted to the revolutionary ideas circulating in Mexico City by the muralists - Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros - and absorbed their energy. Although his artistic directions would probably have been different if she had not had the accident, there is no doubt that

the vital foundations of her painting are nourished by the fieriness and freshness acquired during her youth. The photographs highlight this period in which the identity of a free and passionate Frida was forged, anticipating the genuine work that would come later. The visionary character is intuited in the most symbolic image of all, In Frida’s Time, where she is shown on a table, surrounded by various elements among which is one of the

pictures she would later paint: The Two Fridas. In it, she unfolds, evidencing the complex duality of her person that affects her marital status (the married Frida and the single Frida), but also a temporality crossed by great events that changed her trajectory and transformed her into a great artist. Across the ocean, in a China* undergoing its own radical changes, artists were also finding their voice in the chaos of a changing world . Though separated by continents, the young Frida and the Chinese artists shared a common journey: navigating identity, tradition and the inevitable push toward something new.

Its surrealist approach resonates with Sun Jing's *The Rejected Frida* series (exhibited concurrently) in a cross-temporal and spatial dialogue imbued with a "geo-archival" ethos.

Miguel’s solo exhibition: “The Exotic Gaze” is his second solo exhibition in China following his first exhibition “Sceneries for Reverie” at Beiing 3 Gallery in 2016.

Sun Jing's observation and research on her life and creation in the United States began as early as the fall of 2022, during the quarantined epidemic period. On September 6, 2022, Sun Jing's paintings were introduced in pictures and texts on the official wechat of Being 3 Gallery. The works make people feel the beauty and tenderness of daily life, the growth of life and the purity of art, which touched many Chinese readers and collectors.

As an artist, Sun Jing has a fresh look. She was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu. She graduated from the State University of New York with a bachelor's degree and Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts with a master's degree. In 2019, she entered the field of contemporary art with a solo exhibition "Footsteps: Jingjing's Paintings 2019" at the China Millennium Monument Art Museum. After that, she maintained the popularity and performance of solo exhibitions in professional galleries almost once a year, became a professional artist, and occupied a place in the competitive art world with a trickle-like style.

Regarding Sun Jing's paintings, curator Qian Wenda once wrote: "The works in Sun Jing's solo exhibition contain a strong imaginative experience: the thoughts surging in her life are like streams, flowing from the past to the future. Of course, it is not just a glance that all the scenery is flowing. On the contrary, these scenery allow us to easily feel Sun Jing as a person, as a pure painter's tenacity, sensitivity, self, spirituality, and extremely primitive passion for painting. In the intuitive naturalness and painting of her works, we can see the grammatical aesthetics shared with Henri Rousseau, and the traditional oriental composition principles that are so naturally revealed - this trait is particularly evident in her recent paintings "Hazy Fragrance" and "Fengtai Riverside". "

This time, Sun Jing's solo: "Illusory Reflection", she dialogues with Miguel's "The Exotic Gaze" with cross-cultural parody, abstract lyricism, memory reconstruction, and her "childlike archaeology" temperament.

Different from Miguel's "Frida Series" with the same subject matter and topic, Jingjing uses herself as a medium to parody Frida's classic image through self-portraits. Her Frida is "Rejected Frida". On the surface, the artist recombines and presents Frida's iconic image elements, which is a parody. In this way, the work dissolves the authority of the original work and reinterprets Frida's image in a relaxed, humorous and even teasing manner. For example, the use of elements such as toy monkeys creates a new visual narrative and meaning space, which triggers the audience to rethink the multiple meanings of art, gender, culture, etc. behind Frida's image. But in fact, the artist presents the classic image with a new medium (photography), which expands the interpretation space of Frida's artistic image, and is also a deconstruction and reconstruction of identity and subjectivity: postmodernism emphasizes the deconstruction of fixed identity and subjectivity. Frida's artworks themselves contain a profound exploration of self-identity. She expresses her multiple identities as a woman, a Mexican and an artist through self-portraits. In Jingjing's "Rejected Frida" series, the artist plays Frida in her own image, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, self and others. The name "Rejected Frida" also implies a reinterpretation or alternative imagination of Frida's identity, which may explore the neglected or rejected aspects behind Frida's image, thereby realizing the reconstruction of identity and subjectivity and challenging the traditional single and fixed identity recognition model.

The exhibition also exhibits Sun Jing's landscape paintings and abstract paintings. On the one hand, it fully introduces Sun Jing's working methods and achievements as an artist in recent years; on the other hand, it uses the spirit and aesthetics of Chinese landscape painting to dialogue with Miguel's collage surreal landscape photography with an anthropological perspective.

The exhibition logic and cross-cultural dialogue, the duet becomes a trio.

Spatial narrative. Miguel's "Geological Theater" photography constitutes an "archaeological site of civilization", and the audience walks through the folds of the Mexican landform and feels the historical time accumulation.

Sun Jing's "Mirror Flowers and Water Moon", the ultimate expression of oriental poetic style in Sun Jing's paintings, meets Miguel's "in the Navel of the Moon" series, triggering reflections on the fluidity of identity.

"The Exotic Gaze" (Miguel): Exploring the trauma and resilience of local culture from the perspective of outsiders, exploring the Orientalist gaze.

"Illusory Reflections" (Sun Jing): Looking back at tradition with a cross-cultural identity, transforming cultural memory into portable "spiritual luggage".

The art historical significance of the exhibition.

The exhibition juxtaposes Mexican magical realism with the "lying travel" tradition of Chinese literati painting, proposing "how locality is recoded in the post-globalization era";

Both artists use the strategy of "body intervention in landscape" to respond to the "third space" theory of postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, that is, cultural identity generates new meaning in hybridity.

by Curator: Mianbu .April,2025.Beijing.