Zhang Hua’s Fish Cave employs copper as its medium, using the perforated language of paper-cutting to create a sculptural installation viewable from both inside and out. When viewers peer through the gaps of the copper silhouette, they seem to transform into fish slipping into a cave. Between “entering” and “exiting,” “looking inward” and “gazing outward,” it recreates humanity’s earliest spatial perception from the cave-dwelling era. The starkness of copper collides with the delicacy of paper-cutting, functioning both as a viewfinder and a window peering into history.

The artist transforms experiences from her residency at Fuxian Lake into a metaphor of intersecting time and space: looking inward reveals the surging currents of heartbeat and emotion; looking outward captures the flow of light, sound, and moisture. This dual perspective dismantles the fixed meanings of mythic symbols, much like ancient cave paintings overlapping with contemporary graffiti – both capture fleeting emotions and dissolve linear time. The landscapes etched into the copper sheets transcend mere imagery, becoming conduits for collective memory and personal perception.

Zhang Hua reconstructs traditional symbols through “trimming,” allowing the copper’s iron backbone to bear tender narratives. In the dialectic between ’emptiness’ and “fullness,” will you choose to explore fears and origins inward, or capture the shape of light outward? This is both the way of seeing and humanity’s eternal inner choice when facing the world.