Poetry does not live in grand words, but under the thin shell of an egg, in the heart of the unborn creature.
–Dominique Fortier, Paper Houses (Les villes de papier)
Capsule is pleased to present "the room is empty, but pregnant," Xue Ying’s (b. 1993, Shandong, China) first solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring her latest sculptures and site-specific installations.
Human life unfolds above the ground, within a world governed by the principles of light, order, rationality, and efficiency. Beneath the soil lies a network of insect dwellings and plant roots. Where the sun does not shine, life extends far and wide. The artist constructs her domestic environment around a solid wooden floor, dividing it into the world above and the world below. This physical division mirrors the layered bodily and emotional experiences embedded within the family structure.
The world above the floor is concise and ordered. Ascending the steps, the viewer enters an almost empty space, much like stepping into the home of a friend for the first time, where a quiet flutter of unease and anticipation arises. The pleasure of being a guest lies in the act of observing and discovering: within the carefully composed space, details reveal traces of character and lived reality. The creaking wooden floor emits a soft sheen; patches of soil lie almost unnoticed across its surface; mounds of suds rise and spill over the edge of a basin; a warm yellow light shines from the wall through a perforated iron shoe, conjuring a faint yet enduring constellation (Had I known that the first was the last, all works 2026).
The cracks and edges of the floor are filled with cotton and soil, yet through these openings one may glimpse the world hidden below. Descending the stairs, the curious visitor may shift their posture, bending down to enter beneath the surface of the home. Wind passes through a bedsheet hanging in the corner, stirring its soft folds. A washing bucket becomes a deep well, its flowing water echoing the sound of a mountain creek. The dim yellow light flickers with its own quiet rhythm. Ceramic buttons adorn tangled electrical wires, embedded within the gaps of the floorboards and threaded through twisted metal wires. Beneath the floor lies scattered soil, repeatedly swept away and gathered along the cracks–traces of play, security, and uncertainty are intertwined. The subterranean is a tender emotional world, born from a childlike flux of unanchored thoughts—unintentional, purposeless, and perhaps what we sometimes call poetry.
A sheet of copper, relentlessly hammered, annealed, and colored, is transformed into a worn-out pot. A wrought-iron stand with a medieval silhouette, once used for cooking over an open fire outdoors, now rests beneath the floor. The summer flower that had fallen into the vessel has dried, yet remain strangely preserved. Flickering lights illuminate the object, allowing long-forgotten memories to resurface. Three spoons descend along the curved contour of the vessel toward its center, where they meet without touching. The emotional tension of the work lingers within this delicate distance (A family of three, yet to meet).
Surrounding this sculptural relic is an assemblage of scattered everyday objects: wax blocks resembling soap,convincingly rendered eggs, cocoon-shaped bundles of metal wire, and hand-fired ceramic tiles. The light bulb hangs from a spoon handle, while paint drips between the floorboards. Through attentive observation, the artist selects and re-choreographs the ephemeral fragments of everyday life, creating a space that remains unresolved and open-ended. The works are not completed the moment they leave the studio; rather, they continue to generate new meanings and resonances through their relationships within the exhibition space, and through the presence of visitors who enter, sit upon the hand-sewn cushions, and become part of the work’s continuous unfolding. Sensation cannot be anticipated, and chance cannot be staged. Xue Ying’s working process reflects one of the exhibition’s central propositions: beyond the rational world of calculated planning and precise execution exists another way of knowing, where one reaches out into darkness with extended arms, where the body and the senses gradually trace the contours of a world beyond the grasp of intellect alone.
Through the juxtaposition of these two worlds, Xue Ying reveals the coexistence of order and fluidity in female experience. A nonlinear form of feminine intelligence works in tandem with her sensibility. This inclusiveness emerges not only in her artistic practice but also in domestic life. Smell: Dry is a particularly distinctive work from her eponymous series. In this body of work, the artist uses heated kitchen utensils to leave burn marks upon fabric. The shape and material of each object, the intensity of heat, and the duration of contact interact in unpredictable ways: sometimes the fabric is scorched through, while at other times it retains only traces of varying shades of brown. The work presented in the exhibition originates from the cover of an ironing board that the artist had used for years while creating this series—a unintentional residue of past actions. This element of chance highlights the essence of the series itself: activities in the kitchen, like life itself, cannot hardly be precisely calculated or faithfully reproduced like a scientific experiment. They rely instead upon perception, experience, and intuition. The motif of ironing reappears in The bee is not afraid of me, I know the butterfly. The artist recreates an iron show with patina-treated copper, deconstructing it into a freestanding sculpture, while a phantom of ironing mark emerges across the folded textiles below.
Throughout the exhibition, works continue to enter into dialogue in an intertextual connectivity. Like the refrain of a poem, Xue’s reprise of materials and motifs allows the context of the works to gradually unfold. The clay eggs beneath the floor extend into the nearby sculpture In the heart of the unborn creature. Many of the artist’s male family members work in steel-related industries, and she is therefore familiar with the rows of upward-pointing spikes attached to metal-cutting machinery. She has also witnessed workers walking casually across these sharp surfaces. The work adapts the recurring motif of black spikes that Xue Ying has implemented in her previous practice. Hand-forged iron spikes, taller than the human body, pierce upward in a dense cluster, forming a descending spiral from the outer edge inward. Their tilted forms generate an intensified tension through their trypophobic sense of order. Yet eggs made of clay and wool nestled at the center of the spiral, cradled by these aggressive protrusions. Above the sharp points lies their unlikely refuge.
Following the stairs from the darkness toward the illuminated space by the window, another stairway emerges. The viewer’s gaze ascends into The Female World of Love and Ritual. Through a deftly orchestrated illusion of perspective, the stairway takes on a sacred presence beyond its physical scale, strewn with treasures from everyday life: ceramic buttons guide the eye across its surface; an iron ladle stands upright in a posture of confrontation; a broken silver shell filled with flesh of cotton; crystal fragments glisten with shimmer of emotions. Freshwater pearls spell out the word “care.” Through scavenging remnants and ephemera, the artist composes an epic of the mundane. The spirit of “care” anchors the emotional foundation of the exhibition—they render the inanimate sentient and the everyday timeless.
In the dimly lit room before an approaching storm, time hangs suspended, currents stream incessantly, and wind of musings and memories pass beneath the floor. The artist collects materials, experiences and imaginations from her lived experience, unsettling the ordinary with subtle clues of uncertainty. Through the exhibition, she continues her inquiry into feminine bodily and psychological experiences in the domestic realm, taking which as a prism to reveal alternative ways of relating to the world. Detritus and offerings, reality and perception, logic and intuition, certainty and possibility wax and wane like the sun and moon, illuminating the unfathomable depths and vast openness of lived experience.
