WU SPACE of Contemporary Art presents "In the Heat of the Era", the first major solo exhibition in China by Singaporean artist Kent Chan (b. 1984, Singapore; living in Amsterdam). This exhibition features 11 works created by the artist from 2020 to the present, including newly debuted pieces, constructing a narrative field that interweaves thermodynamics, geoengineering, and cultural imagination. It detached the "tropics" from its geographical definition and reconfigures it as a global thermodynamic condition.
Kent Chan perceives "heat" as a porous force that permeates bodies, histories, and machines. By introducing humidity, thermal energy, and light into the exhibition, heat is rendered as a medium that drives social orders, mythological narrations, and individual memory.
The exhibition unfolds during the seasonal transition from cold to summer heat in Shenyang, a city in northern China. The spatial dynamics of the exhibition resembles a "thermal descent" toward the earth's core—beginning at ground level with the control over climatic sovereignty, descending into the basement level, crossing a vast front where natural light and electronic frequencies synchronously intertwine, and finally entering a sensory realm enclosed by yellow PVC curtains, filled with mist, humidity, and heat.
‘In the Heat of the Era" is not only a title but a claim. In an era when the planet's thermal equilibrium has been disrupted, how do we find our own bearings? Weather is no longer just something that happens to us — it is our very being.
