OBTUSE: a Meditation on the Relation of Space and Object

Space is not a container for art, but a condition through which it is experienced.

Across 18–19 December 2025, Galleria Objets hosted OBTUSE, a two-day programme of exhibition, sound, performance, and culinary intervention. Curated by Selin Kir and Yangrung Chen, and conceived as “a convergence of bodies, material, sound, and shared encounter,” the exhibition brought together works by—among other exceptional artists—Bo Sun, Zeus Li, and Abigail Norris. One productive way of understanding the exhibition’s multifaceted experience is through the lens of spatiality: place, site, and the ways in which objects operate within space.

Space—a fundamental element of art—is traditionally understood as the area within, around, or between objects, structured through systems such as linear and atmospheric perspective and the orchestration of positive and negative space. In OBTUSE, however, space is approached not as a purely optical construct, but as phenomenologically produced through the viewer’s embodied and temporal experience.

As Kant argues in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770), space is not “objective and real,” but “subjective and ideal,” originating in the mind as a framework for coordinating sensory experience. In light of Kant’s formulation, space is not merely a container but a condition that actively shapes composition and meaning.

In conversation with selected exhibited artists, we asked what is currently relevant in their practices as it relates to how objects exist and operate within space. Bo Sun, Zeus Li, and Abigail Norris offered insight into how material, placement, and distance shape the way their work is sensed within the gallery.

Bo Sun:
“I see the work as some kind of inside-out structure where the inside and outside boundary is blurred; the exoskeleton is exposed.”

Bo Sun likens the relationship between the work and its surroundings to that of “scaffolding to a building—an adjacent structure speaking a similar visual language under a differing modular principle.”

Space exists only in relation to someone or something. Thus, relational balance and relative position between objects guide how they are structured within space—how space is occupied and how emptiness is articulated. The delicate negotiation between positive and negative space directs the viewer’s eye, establishing visual order while maintaining cohesion and weight.

Abigail Norris:
“As relationship is always shifting—balance, tension, support, and dependence are in constant motion. These dynamics are not only conceptual but physically embedded in the structure of the work. I’m drawn to working with the sensations held within these states, allowing the forms to collapse, lean, rely, strain, or hold one another in ways that mirror lived relational experience.”

The notion of relation is also evident in Abigail Norris’s titles—symbiont, epibiont, commensal—biological terms that translate into spatial relationships between objects, surfaces, and the gallery itself.

Abigail Norris, Commensal (the quiet house guest), Symbiont, Epibiont.

Abigail Norris:
“These kinds of relationships are constantly happening around us. Micro-organisms live on us, in us, and move through the air of the gallery with us. The bricks are formed from earth; our clothes remain in relation to cotton fields or grazing sheep. Nothing exists in isolation. Yet we suffer from a kind of relational amnesia. The biological terms I use point to this continuous entanglement—between bodies, materials, architecture, and environment.”

Abigail Norris invokes Rupert Spira, whose articulation of entanglement—central to her work and its ethical stakes—recognises that sharing our being with everyone and everything matters, since belief in separateness fosters disconnection and enables cruelty and injustice.

As a group exhibition, OBTUSE entangles multiple works, trajectories, and artistic positions. Bodies and bodies of work are brought together within a shared spatial field, filling—and activating—the negative space of the gallery.

Zeus Li.

Within Zeus Li’s practice, negative space is as deliberate as the object itself, requiring sufficient room in order to “speak.”

Zeus Li:
“In a group exhibition, placing the stump on a white plinth is already a deliberate act of separation. The plinth creates distance—not only from other works, but from the surrounding noise of the space. It allows the object to stand alone, to be encountered in a more focused, almost ideal viewing condition. The negative space is not there to frame the work as something precious, but to let it speak without interruption. Sometimes, silence is what allows an object to articulate itself.”

In sculptural practice, “real” space—and the relationship between form and absence—is central. Bo Sun works with space by creating tension between softness and structure through construction, composition, and varied materiality.

True to its premise as a convergence of bodies, the exhibition foregrounded bodily notions throughout. This is perhaps most evident in the work of Abigail Norris, whose sculptures frequently reference closeness, attachment, and bodily contact. There is an intimacy to her work that is spatially felt rather than directly represented.

Abigail Norris, Title TBC.

Abigail Norris:
“I don’t experience the body as something with fixed boundaries. Things don’t end where our skin ends. I think of everyone and everything as continuously leaking into one another. Our nervous systems are constantly extending and receiving invisible threads that reach far beyond us. Ideas of entanglement deeply influence me, and this feeds into how I understand intimacy as something spatial rather than representational.”

Bo Sun:
“I often describe my work as a way of translating—appointing some kind of bodily or organic logic into harsh structures. For instance, dissecting an industrial structure as bone structure, joint, muscle, or ligaments. Conversely, when I encounter a natural form—such as quirkily shaped flowers—I think about dissecting them into an industrial form, and how I might remake them by repeating a form.”

In practice, this in-between threshold often materialises in objects we encounter frequently—yet whose strangeness we have learned to overlook. Through attentive looking, the latent qualities of these animate, inanimate, or intermediary forms are brought back into focus.

Spatial construction directly affects how viewers physically and emotionally respond to artworks. Zeus Li’s works, often low to the ground and restrained in scale, exemplify this sensitivity.

Zeus Li.

Zeus Li:
“Placing the work close to the ground subtly shifts the viewer’s body and gaze. It asks for bending, slowing down, and closer attention rather than a frontal encounter. This physical adjustment creates an intimate relationship with the object.”

The curation of space thus establishes conditions for slow looking, allowing viewers to move and reflect intentionally. Installation decisions profoundly shape perception.

Spatial curation within the gallery has direct interpretive consequences: the relationship between viewer and artwork shifts according to how space is constructed. Encountered outside the gallery, these same objects would register differently again, as meaning and intensity are shaped by context.

We were glad to invite Bo Sun, Zeus Li, and Abigail Norris into the space of Galleria Objects, and to allow their works to unfold in relation to one another and to those who encountered them. OBTUSE emerged through these shared conditions—of proximity, attention, and exchange—leaving space not as something fixed, but as something briefly held in common.