Before the Feeling Forms A Practice-Based Research Exhibition by ZHAO Jinya

Preface

—

Within the breath of glass, I construct perception through a nomadic interplay of colour, scent, and touch—tracing nonlinear connections between material memory and sensory experience.

Artist ZHAO Jinya

ZHAO Jinya is a nomadic figure whose creative practice is shaped by her embodied engagement with diverse geographies. Through corporeal attunement to the specificity of each environment, her works trace a cartographic sensibility—articulating not only place, but the perceptual residue of being-in-place. This bodily responsiveness gradually gives way to more nuanced modes of perception, through which fluctuating inner states are brought into dialogue with surrounding conditions. While her creative methodology remains fluid—open to difference, disruption, and contingency—her work does not rest in the incidental. Rather, she draws consciously on the totality of these lived experiences, forging, through glass and fire, a distilled urgency: a singular moment held in material form.

Curator WANG Che