Refilling, Rekindle

Refilling, Rekindle, a group exhibition of eleven artists, opened in Nanping Village, Anhui Province, China, in a building about one hundred kilometers beyond the Xunyang waters: a four-story home from the Republican era known as Xiaosi Lou, or “Little Western-style House.” Built by a returning émigré from Southeast Asia in honor of his mother, the house blends Huizhou vernacular with Romanesque style. It is at once a vessel of private memory and a meeting point between aesthetic traditions and local ecologies.

Drawing inspiration from a gathering described in The Song of the Lute, a poem by the mid-Tang poet Bai Juyi—in which he refills the cup and rekindles the light, an image that reflects how memory resurfaces through chance encounters and lingering gazes—this exhibition seeks to break the notion of “ruin” as an endpoint, proposing instead a living space where feeling, growth, and resistance continue to stir—slowly but insistently. The artists step into this aging but animate village to listen: to how time presses through the cracks in the walls, how memory germinates into what will have been.