Bai Yiyi’s works are currently featured in Swivel Gallery’s three-person show “Interspecies: New Scenarios Of Symbiotic Coexistence.” Shanghai-based artist Bai Yiyi visualizes on his canvas the notion of simultaneity and interconnectivity between beings as part of a broader network and ecosystem of essential relations. Initially focused on the experiences and relations between humans and machines, Bai Yiyi's paintings have now extended to an exploration of a more universal interconnection between humans and all beings as part of a mysterious cosmic order. Embracing the traditional notion of “Dao,” and the idea of a collective consciousness governing all life processes, Yiyi’s seemingly abstract and densely symbolic paintings visualize this multifaceted fluid impenetrability of all things, envisioning alternative synthetic and symbiotic existential dimensions that could allow mutual survival and energetic health preservation. Fluttering and drifting into a fluid flow, Bai Yiyi creates revelatory visual embodiments of a reality made of minuscule essences, which connect, converge, and dissolve into one another.
The works in the show exist in a fluid limbo, where transformative metamorphosis between organic and artificial is still a potential state. Blurring the lines between the known and the yet unknown, the works in the exhibition both test and already envision a different interconnectedness and symbiosis of different entities in a continuous intertwining between human and non-human.
