From 24th to 28th Jun 2025, Batsford Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition “Of Self, Time, and Trembling Silence”. The exhibition presents an intimate exploration into the fragmented and fluid nature of self-awareness through the lens of nonlinear time. Curated by Ziyi Xiong, this exhibition gathers works that treat the ‘self’ not as a fixed point but as a continuously folding, overlapping temporal structure — a psychological terrain where memory, body, and image are penetrated and shaped by time.
Fan’s drawing focuses on the unspeakable—fear, trauma, resistance, and the thresholds of perception—compressed between the body and materiality. Through a restrained yet evocative visual language, each work constructs a psychological space: outwardly silent, yet internally charged with fissures and a looming sense of eruption.
In these works, the self is not a fixed centre, but a series of temporal fragments—stretched, displaced, and overlapped in the process of introspective inquiry. This is an exhibition about looking inward, a meditation on the self and a challenge to the boundaries of visual visibility. Some pieces whisper to you; others trap you in their gaze, compelling a confrontation with your own unease.
Here, the artist renders a cartography of time—not as a linear progression of past, present, and future, but as a field of vortices, ruptures, and accumulation. Image, color, and structure operate as interwoven threads, collectively composing a subjectivity that is in perpetual becoming.
About the artist
Zhengwei Fan is a visual storyteller and illustrator whose work traverses memory, landscape, and emotional fragility through delicately constructed visual narratives. Working primarily in watercolour and pencil on paper, his practice centres on a quiet form of image-making that merges drawing with slow observation. His compositions often emerge from personal experiences of isolation, daily routine, and ecological vanishing, giving form to complex inner states with visual restraint.
His artistic approach draws from a kind of personal archaeology—where past travel, field research, and introspective observation converge into a visual language shaped by time and loss. Whether evoking the slow death of glaciers or the muted loneliness of office life, Fan’s work lingers at the intimate edge of the ephemeral and the archival. With a background in illustration and a sensitivity to narrative structure, he constructs intimate visual worlds where presence flickers and solitude quietly resonates.
About the curator
Ziyi Xiong is a London-based curator and cultural producer whose practice explores the poetics of materiality, memory, and the unseen. With a background spanning fine art and interdisciplinary research, she has curated exhibitions across the UK, China, America and Canada.
“Zhengwei Fan: Of Self, Time, and Trembling Silence” is curated by Ziyi Xiong.
