Porous Boundaries: The Unstable Nature of Being
Curated by Yessíca Torres
2–5 August 2026
Hackney Gallery, 1 Lower Clapton Road, London E9 0NS
Where does the body end and the world begin? It is a question that appears deceptively straightforward, yet becomes increasingly difficult to answer when the physical, digital and natural environments that shape human existence are considered together. Our bodies are neither entirely self-contained nor independent of their surroundings. They absorb, respond, remember and transform, carrying the traces of countless encounters with the world beyond their visible limits.
In Porous Boundaries, London-based artist Victoria Yuanli Yuan explores this instability through a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, mixed media, moving image and digital imagery. Presented at Hackney Gallery and curated by Yessíca Torres, the exhibition brought together works that challenge conventional distinctions between the human body and its environment, questioning the idea that identity can be understood as something singular, permanent or securely contained.
Born in Shenzhen, China, and educated in the United States, Yuan brings together cultural experience, material experimentation and contemporary philosophical enquiry. Her practice draws particularly on posthuman ecofeminism and hydrofeminism, approaches that challenge the separation of human beings from the ecological and material systems through which life is sustained. Rather than positioning the body as an autonomous subject observing the external world, Yuan considers it an evolving condition, shaped by its exchanges with water, technology, memory and other forms of matter.
Water occupies a particularly significant position within this enquiry. Associated with birth, vulnerability, transformation and the movement of life itself, it offers a way of reconsidering the boundaries traditionally used to distinguish one body from another. Yet Yuan’s exploration extends beyond the organic. Artificial surfaces, technological processes and digital environments complicate the distinction between what is natural and what is constructed, suggesting that contemporary identity is increasingly formed through encounters with both.
Throughout the exhibition, familiar imagery is rendered unfamiliar. Architectural structures appear unstable, landscapes dissolve into shifting textures, and seemingly biological forms emerge from luminous digital environments. The works move between recognisable subjects and abstraction, inviting viewers to question the reliability of the forms through which they understand the world.
The exhibition’s title is particularly appropriate. A porous boundary is not simply an edge that has disappeared. It is a threshold through which things can pass, a condition that simultaneously separates and connects. Within Yuan’s practice, these thresholds are sometimes protective, sometimes restrictive and frequently uncertain. They exist between the body and its surroundings, between memory and representation, and between the physical object and its technological counterpart.
What emerges is an exploration of existence as a continual process of becoming, rather than a fixed state of being.
Architecture, Memory and the Fragility of Form
One of the most visually commanding works presented in Porous Boundaries is And Then There Was Light (2026), a large-scale oil painting whose intense colour and fractured architectural composition establish an immediate contrast with the surrounding gallery space.
At first glance, the painting appears to depict the Trinity lighthouse standing against a turbulent blue sky. Yet the structure resists any straightforward architectural reading. Its form has been dismantled and reconstructed through intersecting geometric planes, with angular extensions projecting outwards in orange, purple and green. The central tower retains enough of its original appearance to be recognisable, but its proportions and structural relationships have been dramatically altered.
The effect is both monumental and precarious. The lighthouse rises confidently through the composition, yet its component parts appear to exist in a state of uncertain balance. The building is simultaneously an object of stability and something that might be rearranged or transformed.
This contradiction is central to the painting’s significance.
Traditionally, the lighthouse represents guidance, safety and permanence. It offers a fixed point from which people can navigate uncertain surroundings. Yuan disrupts these associations by presenting a structure whose own identity appears unstable. Its architectural solidity is interrupted by geometric forms that resist conventional perspective, creating a visual tension between its familiar function and its unfamiliar appearance.
The surrounding landscape intensifies this uncertainty. Swirling passages of turquoise, ultramarine, yellow and pale violet sweep across the sky, while circular blue forms punctuate the composition. Beneath the lighthouse, distant snow-covered mountains and a narrow stretch of water provide recognisable geographical features, although they seem to belong to an entirely different visual order from the towering structure above them.
The contrast between the relatively restrained distant landscape and the exaggerated architecture produces an unusual sensation of scale. The lighthouse becomes almost bodily, its upright form suggesting a figure attempting to maintain its position against forces beyond its control.
Of particular interest is the distinction between the angular structure and the fluid movements of the sky. These two visual languages initially appear opposed, with geometry implying construction and control, while the sweeping atmospheric gestures suggest freedom and unpredictability. Yet neither remains entirely separate. The colours of the surrounding environment appear within the architectural form, while the building’s projecting planes penetrate the space around it.
Yuan seems less interested in depicting a place than in considering how place itself becomes altered through perception and memory.
The work’s title introduces a further ambiguity. Light is traditionally associated with revelation or understanding, yet the painting offers no complete moment of clarity. Instead, illumination appears to coexist with uncertainty. The lighthouse remains recognisable without ever becoming entirely secure.
This is one of the exhibition’s most effective visual expressions of its central proposition: that apparent stability may be no more than a temporary arrangement of constantly changing elements.
The Language of Paint
A different understanding of permeability emerges in Yuan’s smaller abstract paintings, including works from her Untitled series.
Displayed together on the gallery walls, these paintings demonstrate a more intimate and physically direct engagement with material. Their surfaces are built through energetic applications of paint, with colours dragged, layered and interrupted to create dense arrangements of overlapping gestures.
In one composition, pale creams, blues, greens and muted yellows develop into forms that suggest vegetation, moving water or the compressed energy of a landscape. Elsewhere, a dominant expanse of yellow is interrupted by darker passages and cooler shades, creating the impression of a natural environment undergoing sudden change.
These associations remain deliberately unresolved.
The paintings invite the viewer to search for recognisable forms without providing enough certainty to establish a definitive subject. What might initially resemble foliage becomes a collection of marks; what appears to be a geographical feature dissolves into pigment and texture.
This instability is strengthened by the physical character of the paint itself. Thick applications sit against scraped and exposed areas, allowing the surface to register successive decisions and alterations. The resulting images retain evidence of their own construction.
Unlike the digital imagery elsewhere in the exhibition, these paintings make the artist’s physical engagement with material particularly apparent. The pressure of the painting tool, the movement of pigment and the resistance of the surface become essential components of the work.
They also introduce an important temporal dimension. Each layer partially conceals what came before, yet earlier marks continue to influence the final composition. In this respect, the paintings offer a compelling parallel with memory, which is rarely preserved intact but continually revised through subsequent experience.
Their connection to the exhibition’s wider conceptual concerns lies not simply in their apparent resemblance to natural environments, but in the way form is created through accumulation, interruption and change.
However, the relationship between these materially expressive paintings and the exhibition’s more explicitly technological works requires some interpretative effort. Their shared concerns are visible in their resistance to stable representation, although the conceptual connection is less immediate than the visual contrast between them.
This difference is not necessarily a weakness. It allows the exhibition to acknowledge that uncertainty can emerge through distinct processes, whether through the manipulation of paint or the construction of a digital image.
The Body Before Its Boundaries
The moving-image work Light in Womb (2024) brings Yuan’s investigation of bodily identity into a more intimate and biological territory.
Presented on a screen within the gallery, the work introduces a luminous, predominantly blue visual environment populated by translucent circular structures, soft distortions and shifting forms that suggest cellular activity.
At its centre, a symmetrical formation appears suspended within a field of light. Its undulating contours evoke a membrane, a developing organism or a form of life that has not yet acquired a stable identity.
The imagery moves between the familiar and the unfamiliar. There are suggestions of microscopic biology, underwater environments and speculative digital worlds, but no single visual reference is sufficient to explain the composition.
This uncertainty is particularly appropriate to the subject.
The womb is traditionally understood as a protected interior, a space in which one body develops within another. Yet its biological reality challenges the idea of the individual as entirely separate or self-sustaining. Before birth, the developing body exists through a complex relationship of exchange and dependence.
Yuan extends this understanding into a broader reflection on the interconnected nature of existence.
The blue environment appears to contain the central form, but also seems inseparable from it. The translucent structures surrounding the image create an impression of continual circulation, suggesting that the boundary between the emerging body and its environment is neither fixed nor entirely visible.
The work’s digital character is equally important. Rather than representing the body through conventional figurative imagery, Yuan constructs an environment in which biological associations are transformed through technological means.
This produces a productive ambiguity. The viewer encounters imagery that feels organic, but which is mediated through a screen and generated through digital processes. What appears to represent the beginnings of biological life is experienced through a distinctly artificial visual language.
The distinction between the natural and the technological consequently becomes difficult to maintain.
There is also a more unsettling quality beneath the work’s apparent beauty. Its luminous colour and softly floating forms create an almost meditative atmosphere, yet the unfamiliar structures prevent the image from becoming entirely comforting. The possibility of formation exists alongside the possibility of dissolution.
Within the context of Porous Boundaries, Light in Womb provides an important emotional counterpoint to the more architectural paintings. Where the lighthouse suggests an established structure confronting instability, the moving image considers identity before its boundaries have fully emerged.
The two works approach existence from different positions, yet both reject the assumption that an identifiable form must also be a self-contained one.
Constructed Worlds and the Circulation of Identity
Yuan’s digital work Divine Entertainment Ltd. (2025) introduces a noticeably different atmosphere.
The panoramic composition presents an elaborate fictional landscape populated by extraordinary creatures, miniature human figures, architectural structures and surreal botanical forms. Pastel greens and pinks dominate the scene, while an oversized celestial sphere hangs above an environment that appears to combine elements of a fantasy garden, an amusement park and a speculative civilisation.
At its centre stands a tree-like formation bearing numerous eye-shaped forms, transforming an otherwise familiar natural symbol into something simultaneously playful and disquieting.
The composition rewards prolonged attention. Small figures move through the landscape, strange animals occupy the foreground, and improbable structures rise from rolling green terrain. Industrial chimneys release smoke into the pale sky, introducing a recognisable reference to environmental exploitation within an otherwise fantastical setting.
The contrast is striking.
Although the world appears whimsical, there is an underlying tension between its decorative exuberance and the systems of control, production and consumption suggested by its imagery.
The title Divine Entertainment Ltd. is central to understanding this tension. The language of corporate organisation sits uneasily alongside the idea of the divine, implying that mythology, spirituality and cultural identity might themselves become forms of entertainment or commercially organised spectacle.
The work draws together different cultural and mythological references, recalling the densely populated imaginative landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch while incorporating visual elements associated with both Eastern and Western traditions.
Yet this is not simply an exercise in fantastical world-building.
By placing culturally distinct imagery within a single constructed environment, Yuan raises questions about what happens when symbols move beyond their original contexts. Their meanings become open to reinterpretation, appropriation and commercial circulation.
This introduces a social and cultural dimension to the exhibition’s central theme.
Boundaries do not exist only between physical bodies and their environments. They also distinguish traditions, communities and systems of belief. As images circulate through increasingly interconnected digital spaces, these boundaries become more difficult to maintain.
Yuan’s invented world can therefore be understood as a reflection on cultural permeability, and on the way contemporary visual culture continually rearranges inherited meanings.
Importantly, the work does not present this process as entirely liberating.
Its extraordinary abundance creates a sense of possibility, but also of saturation. So much is available to be seen that the individual elements risk losing their distinct significance within the larger spectacle.
This tension between imaginative freedom and the reduction of cultural symbols to consumable images gives the work much of its critical force.
Its relationship to Porous Boundaries is consequently less explicitly bodily than that of Light in Womb, yet no less relevant. It extends Yuan’s investigation of permeability from the organic subject into the collective environments through which identity and meaning are produced.
Curating Relationships Between Materials
The presentation at Hackney Gallery provided a relatively restrained architectural setting for an exhibition concerned with instability, transformation and the uncertainty of physical boundaries.
White walls, a neutral floor and straightforward arrangements of artworks allowed the differences between Yuan’s media to remain clearly visible.
The large-scale And Then There Was Light occupied a prominent position on one wall, its intense blue palette and imposing vertical structure creating a visual anchor within the space. Smaller paintings and mixed-media works were distributed across the adjacent walls, while the screen-based presentation of Light in Womb introduced a distinct source of colour and luminosity.
This arrangement established a productive contrast between the physical presence of painting and the immaterial appearance of moving imagery.
Paintings retain their textures, edges and physical relationships to the wall. The screen, by comparison, presents a changing field of light within a manufactured object. Both are material experiences, but they invite different forms of attention.
The exhibition’s title acquires particular relevance through this distinction.
Although the works occupy separate formats, their subjects continually overlap. Biological structures resemble digital constructions, landscapes suggest bodies, and architectural forms become vulnerable to the same transformations associated with organic matter.
The gallery’s relatively open arrangement allows these relationships to develop through visual comparison rather than elaborate installation design.
At the same time, the exhibition’s conceptual ambition is considerable for a presentation of this scale.
Hydrofeminism, ecological interdependence, cultural mythology, technological mediation and the instability of identity are substantial subjects, each capable of sustaining an exhibition in its own right. Bringing them together inevitably creates moments when the connections between individual works are more philosophical than immediately apparent.
This is particularly evident in the transition from the intimate imagery of Light in Womb to the expansive cultural spectacle of Divine Entertainment Ltd.
The two works clearly share an interest in constructed environments and the permeability of identity, but their emotional registers and visual languages differ considerably.
A more developed interpretative framework could have helped articulate these relationships, particularly for viewers unfamiliar with the theoretical ideas underpinning Yuan’s practice.
Nevertheless, the exhibition benefits from resisting the temptation to make every work illustrate the same proposition.
Rather than imposing visual uniformity, the selection allows the idea of boundaries to operate across several registers, from the intimate and biological to the environmental, technological and cultural.
The curatorial achievement lies in making these diverse approaches available for comparison while preserving their individual character.
Beyond the Autonomous Self
One of the most significant aspects of Yuan’s practice is its challenge to the idea that identity can be separated from the environments in which it develops.
This concern has particular relevance in a contemporary world where personal experience is increasingly mediated through technologies that organise, categorise and reproduce information about the body.
Digital images can be manipulated, identities reconstructed and biological processes translated into data. At the same time, ecological awareness has made the material dependence of human life on broader environmental systems increasingly difficult to ignore.
Yuan brings these conditions into proximity without reducing them to a straightforward opposition between nature and technology.
Her digital works are not presented as artificial alternatives to embodied existence, just as her paintings do not offer an uncomplicated return to physical authenticity. Instead, both mediums are used to question the assumption that these categories can remain distinct.
This position is especially apparent when Light in Womb and Divine Entertainment Ltd. are considered together.
The former suggests a biological identity developing through its relationship with a surrounding environment. The latter imagines cultural identity as something continually reorganised through the exchange and reconstruction of symbols.
In both instances, individuality emerges through relationships rather than separation.
The exhibition’s feminist and ecological concerns are therefore not confined to a particular representation of the female body. They extend towards a broader reconsideration of autonomy, dependency and the systems through which subjects are constituted.
There is a political dimension to this argument, even when it remains implicit.
The notion of a completely independent individual has long occupied a privileged position within Western philosophical traditions. By foregrounding permeability and mutual dependence, Yuan challenges the value placed on separation, control and self-sufficiency.
Her works suggest that vulnerability need not be understood solely as weakness. It may also be a condition of connection, allowing bodies, memories and cultures to change through encounters with something beyond themselves.
The strongest moments in Porous Boundaries occur when these ideas are communicated through visual experience rather than theoretical explanation.
The destabilised lighthouse, the densely worked painting surfaces and the translucent biological forms possess an immediate expressive force. Their meanings develop through looking, and through recognising the limitations of familiar categories.
In this respect, the exhibition is most persuasive when it allows ambiguity to remain genuinely open.
Porous Boundaries presented a thoughtful and visually varied examination of the shifting relationships between body, environment, material and identity.
Across painting, moving image and digital composition, Victoria Yuanli Yuan brought together forms that resist being understood as fixed or self-contained. Buildings appear capable of transformation, painted landscapes emerge through unstable accumulations of gesture, biological imagery dissolves into digital light, and mythological worlds become sites of cultural exchange and reinvention.
The exhibition’s strength lay in the differences between these approaches. Rather than establishing a single visual language, Yuan explored how permeability might be understood through physical materials, technological processes and symbolic systems.
There were moments when the breadth of the conceptual enquiry exceeded the clarity of its presentation. The connections between individual works were not always immediately apparent, and the exhibition’s complex theoretical foundations sometimes required greater explanation than the visual arrangement alone could provide.
Yet these tensions also revealed something important about the nature of the subject itself.
Boundaries are rarely simple. They can provide protection while imposing restrictions, establish identity while creating division, and offer apparent stability while remaining vulnerable to change.
In Yuan’s work, the possibility of transformation is ever-present, whether through the movement of paint, the circulation of water, the reconstruction of an image or the encounter between different cultural traditions.
Ultimately, Porous Boundaries did not attempt to establish where the self definitively begins or ends. Its more compelling achievement was to challenge the assumption that such a distinction can ever be entirely secure.
What remains is an understanding of identity not as something isolated and complete, but as something continually formed through contact with the world.
In this sense, the exhibition’s most resonant proposition is also its simplest: to exist is to be changed by what surrounds us.
