Kyoto Meetings

MANGROVEGALLERY presents Our Fervor and Solitude, a solo project by Hou Yijie, in the Kyoto Meetings section of Art Collaboration Kyoto 2026.

The project is grounded in Hou’s engagement with Kyoto’s aesthetic sensibility. In Kyoto, temples, shrines, and ordinary residences often stand just a wall apart, where weathered surfaces and meticulously structured architecture generate a subtle yet vital tension. Gardens, pathways, and karesansui landscapes together compose a carefully orchestrated sensory order, whose vitality emerges through imperfection and interruption.

Hou Yijie’s practice dismantles history, legend, and reality into unstable fields of tension, seeking rupture within systems of order. Through layering, disruption, and interference, he foregrounds the inconsistencies and dissonances embedded in visual language. Rawness, recklessness, and imbalance form the core of his visual vocabulary. Hou’s artistic temperament stands in sharp contrast to Kyoto’s refinement, yet the two become inseparable counterparts: refinement and roughness, order and chaos together constitute the precise site of his intervention.

For this presentation, Hou proposes a folding screen painting. Both an emblem of East Asian aesthetic traditions and a device for dividing space and directing movement, the screen allows the artist to introduce disturbance into conventional modes of viewing, exploring how dissonance, roughness, and incompletion may coexist with stillness and harmony within a single visual experience.