Before the World

“Before all things were named, classified, and endowed with meaning — what was the WORLD like?”

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The exhibition Before the World takes this question as its point of departure, seeking to return the act of viewing to a state prior to all imposed definitions. Rather than rushing to provide clear answers or treating the works as objects awaiting interpretation, the exhibition is more concerned with how, in the encounter with art, one gradually forms a relationship with the world through the processes of bodily perception, sensation, and attentive pause.

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This exhibition brings together Taiwanese artist Hung Zhen-You and Japanese artist Ryoko Kumakura. Employing distinct artistic methods and visual languages, the two artists create a juxtaposition charged with tension, while also converging on a shared proposition: when we have grown accustomed to understanding the world through pre-existing concepts, do we at the same time lose other possibilities for sensing it? From different perspectives, their works address, on the one hand, the ways in which human beings construct the world through reason, structure, and cognition; and on the other, evoke a more immediate, instinctive mode of perception—one that preserves those fluid states not yet clearly named, yet genuinely present within the senses and lived experience. In this way, viewing becomes not merely a process of understanding, but an opportunity to re-experience both the self and the external world.

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What Before the World proposes, then, is precisely the possibility of seeing anew: before the world became “the world,” how might we have sensed it? The meaning of the works is not fixed in advance, but gradually takes shape through each pause, movement, turn, and sensation of the viewer. What matters here is not the immediate grasp of content, but rather how the viewer may, in the act of looking, temporarily suspend habitual modes of interpretation and return to a perceptual field not yet fully disciplined by language.