Art Fairs

11 – 14 November 2026

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Tender Archives is the curatorial concept for Sun Xiaolan's presentation at ART021 2026, and a proposition about how women come to know the world through matter. Continuing their earlier collaboration abroad, WhiteShepherd Gallery presents three series: water in its liquid state, plants in a settled state, and clay in its solid state. Each corresponds to a way of knowing: sensing through touch what vanishes in flow, preserving women's knowledge of nature in the manner of a herbarium, and shaping the earth by hand into forms that can be held.

Concentric ripples are the exhibition's central image: the instant a drop touches the water is recorded on canvas with seismographic precision, and with the gaze turned downward, the landscape exists only as reflection. The plant series settles this fluid looking into knowledge that can be kept, while the ceramics carry the exhibition into touch: viewers must walk around them to see them whole.

Tender Archives is not a lament for absence, but an assertion: what has never been entered into the official record has always been here, existing in another form.