Exhibition View of “Becoming a Cactus”
When the reality turns into a desert, how should we cope with it? Chen Hui provides her answer with a solo exhibition entitled on “Becoming a Cactus.” This exhibition is far more than just about plants as the artist intends to break the boundary between humans and plants, allowing them to be deeply integrated on the canvas. They are not just visual creations but they also manifest the survival wisdom. The inspiration comes from a saying: “If you cannot change the desert and have no means to leave it, then turn yourself into a cactus.” This precisely captures the core of Chen Hui’s art: in an inescapable reality, how to reshape oneself and grow stubbornly.
Exhibition View of “Becoming a Cactus”“Plants are the gentlest beings that I know.”
Chen Hui’s artistic practice has always been closely connected to her life experiences. Her early series “Exotic Styles” (2005–2013) captured the absurd landscapes of consumer society, by placing figures amid demolition ruins and urban fringes, she reflected the fluidity of identity amid social changes. She was more of an observer and critic standing outside the social scene at that time. A significant turning point came in 2014 when her mother fell ill. She realized that “a face can hold such rich meaning” through long-term companionship with her mother. The series “Your Portrait” (2014–2024) ceased to focus on socially symbolic faces but turned to depictions of her family, friends, and herself. Beneath her self-portrait “Me”, she handwritten a quote from poet Emily Dickinson: “Plants are the gentlest beings that I know. They do not judge, do not demand, they simply love.” This sentence reflects the essence of the artworks themselves, and it also serves as a spiritual thread throughout the exhibition.
Chen Hui’s mother Zhang Xiaoling, art critic Li Xianting, Chen Hui, Chen Hui’s father and aesthetic theorist Chen Zui, art critic Liao Wen
“Portraits of the Other” (2020–2021) marks a renewed turn of her gaze. Chen Hui directed her attention to the virtual faces from the online world—politicians, internet celebrities, patients, prisoners—these “image ghosts” composed of pixels become her medium for perceiving the external world. These works are meticulously arranged within acrylic frames, suspended from the ceiling, forming a floating jungle of images in the center of the gallery. She reconstructs these figures by painting them on paper, not by merely copying them, but through a way of iconographic “decoding.” She references Agamben’s discussion of “contemporaries,” emphasizing that artists should maintain a gaze closely upon their own era to perceive both the light and the darkness. In this sense, Chen Hui’s gaze itself is an action, a way of seeking strength in the midst of darkness.
Exhibition View of “Becoming a Cactus”
When her gaze shifts from “human face”' to “plants,” her creation enters a deeper philosophical dimension. She points out that humans in the post-internet era are experiencing a “plant-like” transition: they are seemingly silent and passive on the surface, yet in reality intertwined and connected like plant roots in unseen places. In “Becoming a Cactus,” she no longer merely depicts plants but attempts to “become” plants—as she breaks and reconstructs the forms of humans and plants. The figures in the paintings merge with agave and cacti, so that their forms are both guardians and imprisonments, both armor and soft spots. These images are no longer traditional portraits but visual representations of a certain “state of life.”
Becoming a Cactus, Oil on canvas, 200 cm x 170 cm, 2025
Chen Hui introduced her works on scene.
Becoming a “Plant-like Human” in the Digital Desert
Chen Hui refers to this state of existence as being a “plant-like human.” In her view, traditional humanism often emphasizes the “animal nature” of human beings, whereas in a technology-saturated contemporary era, humans increasingly exhibit “plant-like” traits: passivity, dependence on the internet, and inward silence. However, she does not see this as degeneration; instead, she suggests that it may be a form of new survival wisdom—a strategy to maintain vitality in inescapable circumstances. She keenly perceives how developments in science and technology as well as internet influences accelerate the numbing process of human perception and the homogenization of subjectivity, constructing the dual imagery of the “plant-like human” and the “humanized plant.”According to her understanding, the life of plants is not bound by death and wilting can be continued in another form, which symbolizes the potential of humanity in future conditions—when subjectivity is gradually eroded, we may only be able to resist like plants in the gentlest way and grow in the most silent posture.
Chen Hui walked through “Becoming a Cactus.”
When AI image generation technology is becoming increasingly mature, Chen Hui insists on returning to painting, this ancient “physical practice.” She proposes the concept of “spiritual sugar detox,” pointing out that virtual internet and AI, like the “soma” described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, constantly create illusions of spiritual pleasure, causing people to lose the capacity to endure real suffering and darkness. In “The Sad Young Man,” she layers the fear brought by illness and rebirth onto the canvas, making painting a form of “self-liberation.” She believes that “contemporary people not only need a ‘sugar detox’ physically, but also an intermittent ‘sugar detox’ spiritually,” and we should contemplate both the bright and dark sides of life itself, thereby gaining true strength.
The Sad Young Man, Oil on canvas, 200 cm x 170 cm, 2023
Chen Hui breaks through the traditional white-box exhibition paradigm by juxtaposing more than thirty paintings with real plants, creating a symbiotic space of “painting—plants.” The exhibition becomes a “plant sanctuary” and there are interactive areas, inviting visitors to comment, exchange, or adopt plants, suggesting that “adopting unhealthy plants and nurturing them back to health echoes the theme of the exhibition.” This allows the exhibition itself to become a continuously growing and evolving organism, achieving a transformation from personal spiritual practice to a public perceptual domain.
Exhibition View of “Becoming a Cactus”
Curator Wang Chuncheng interprets “becoming a cactus” as a “Buddhist hymn that awakens the perception of reality,” and Chen uses this to make her paintings “sharp tools for contending with the phenomenal world.” Here, the cactus is not merely a plant but also a symbol of a philosophy of life: being tough and defensive on the outside while being soft and juicy on the inside, patiently waiting for its bloom during droughts. In Chen Hui’s ideal, people should “be as resilient as a cactus, soft at heart, and spiny on the outside,” maintaining boundaries while not giving up the possibility of blooming—this serves both as an insight into individual survival and as a profound response to the human circumstances in the digital age.
Text (CN) by Zhang Chong, edited (CN) by Mengxi, (EN) by Sue/ CAFA ART INFO.
About the Exhibition
Becoming a Cactus
Curator: Wang Chunchen
Dates: October 18-December 28, 2025
Organizer: The Contemporary Art Research Center of CAFAM
Collaborator: UNSW Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art
Address: 706 North Third Street, 798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Image Courtesy of The Contemporary Art Research Center of CAFAM.
