Shibui Spectrum focuses on Chen Yun’s recent explorations in painting and olfactory art, featuring eleven groups of paintings and three scent-based works. The word “shibui” is borrowed from Japanese, encompassing nuances that traverse taste, emotion, and temporality—bitterness, restraint, and quiet depth—all qualities of latent potential that have yet to fully unfold.
Rather than emphasizing process or final form, this exhibition turns its attention to what has been left to rest, revisited, or even set aside over time. The works emerge and evolve within this continuum, gradually reshaping their internal structure through the passage of duration and reflection.
Through the interweaving of scent and serial paintings, Shibui Spectrum proposes a non-linear mode of viewing. Some images depart from the compositional logic of their initial sketches, transforming into new narrative structures along an expanded temporal axis; others preserve traces of unfinished gestures, gaining tension through their reverence for what remains and endures from the past.
Extending the multisensory trajectory initiated in Entering the Dissipating Fog of Fragments Light, Chen Yun continues to construct a framework of “painting × scent × memory.” By moving between sensory registers, viewers are invited to enter a rhythm that overlaps with their own memories, reawakening a shared empathy that has never been fully spoken.
