June 29 – July 11, 2025

Underline Art Space, London

Sen Kwok

Anais Ost, Annabel Cator, Keiying Yip, Lanyun Huang, Xiaoren Fan, Yichun Huang, Ziyi Wang & Siyuan Shen 

Underline Art Space

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

After Language is a curatorial inquiry into the nature of expression when language falters. In an age marked by communicative misfires, cultural dislocations, migration, the erosion of mother tongues, and fragmented speech across digital platforms, language ceases to function as a universal bridge. Instead, it becomes an obstacle. This exhibition turns toward nonverbal expression—image, rhythm, ritual, material, structure, body, and silence—as alternate forms of articulation that speak powerfully without relying on words.

This exhibition gathers artists who create beyond, against, or after language. Their practices resist the dominance of narrative clarity and instead embrace the ambiguous, affective, and open-ended qualities of nonverbal expression. Works included engage with the absence of language, the untranslatable, and the power of silence. Here, art is not only a mode of creation, but a reconsideration of what it means to be understood.

During the opening, Lanyun Huang presented her performance am,t ,s,me, embedding her body in the bathroom—a private yet hyper-structured space. Rather than mimicking bathroom objects, she becomes absorbed by their system, dissolving her subjectivity as language deteriorates into unconscious vocal fragments. In this silent collapse, language devolves into residue, and the artist, covered by utilitarian objects, becomes a ghostly echo of institutional control. In the aftermath of language, the body becomes the shadow of order, the trace of voice, the residue of structure.

Yichun Huang’s paintings approach the limits of linguistic structure through an intuitive, trance-like process. Avoiding predetermined composition, she constructs spatial fragments through layered geometry and vivid color, forming a visual system guided by subconscious flow. Her work enacts a form of ritual image-making that bypasses language, activating inner perceptual systems and proposing new links between self and world.

Xiaoren Fan’s sculptural practice offers a material narrative that transcends verbal articulation. Working with fire and earth as elemental codes, his installations generate sensory systems of transformation. Here, language is displaced by the density of material, tactile rhythm, and symbolic residue. In a posthuman framework, his works evolve as quasi-organic entities, breaking with anthropocentric modes of meaning. Viewers do not “read” the work—they receive it through resonance with matter.

In Anais Ost’s ensemble of installations, matter becomes both site and voice. Her sculptural language draws on geological time, erosion, and mirrored disfiguration. In these works, the pedestal is no longer support—it is sediment, memory, and affective container. Reflective surfaces don’t return identity but splinter it. Anais constructs a nonverbal grammar through texture, collapse, and reflection—a poetics of material tension and quiet resistance. In the absence of language, her works continue to speak, not through narrative, but through glimmer, trace, and weight.

Ziyi Wang & Siyuan Shen present a visual inquiry into the dialectics of material and data. Beginning with parametric design and 3D printing, and concluding in handwoven, dyed nylon structures, their work re-embeds digital aesthetics into tactile form. No longer mere tool, the digital becomes substance—felt, seen, and embodied. Their work inhabits the tension between virtual and real, order and contingency, standardization and individuation. In the retreat of language, expression migrates to the edge of structure, into the weave of surface, and the breath of form.

Keiying Yip’s practice poses a crucial question: when language fails, how does the sacred endure? By reimagining Buddhist iconography and sacred relics, Yip releases belief from linguistic codification and reactivates its vitality through material resonance. Her works do not narrate—they reveal. Through silence, transformation, and nonhuman presence, she opens an affective space where belief, identity, and being unfold in a nonverbal continuum.

Annabel Cator’s installation A torso , a thing , a flower. explores the mutual collapse of linguistic structure and bodily boundary. Rooted in queer ecology and biomaterial research, her practice locates the body within cycles of decay and regeneration, forming a post-linguistic ecology of becoming. By dissolving binaries and embracing the logic of matter in flux, she proposes a silent ethics of resistance—language is not rejected, but composted; not spoken, but grown.

Together, these artists present a world not after communication, but after language—where expression persists through surface, frequency, and fracture. They build a shared vocabulary of textures, gestures, and atmospheres. One does not “read” this exhibition. One feels it.

We Spoke in Silences, We Understood in Fragments.