The City Breathes, Mother’s Daughter are two projects by artists Mengzhu Li and Jiaxin Chen, united in an exhibition under the theme “Echoes Between Us.” The exhibition was presented in September 2025 at London’s Batsford Gallery. At first glance, their approaches seem different: Li focuses on intimate domestic spaces, while Chen focuses on the open urban expanses of Hong Kong. However, a closer look reveals a common theme: both artists work with memory, materiality, and emotional nuance, creating spaces where the private and the public meet and intertwine. The exhibition curator by Huan Zhou, founder of PA Art and Artflow Studio notes:

Both artists are concerned with the fragility of memory, the way it folds and unfolds, breaks and reorganizes over time and circumstance. As a curator, my job was not to impose a thematic agenda, but to create a space in which such visual and emotional dialogue could evolve naturally.

This approach turns the gallery into a place where the mother’s whisper is adjacent to the hum of a sleepless city, and the intertwined images of Hong Kong in Chen’s works become gestures of attentiveness and care. The exhibition invites the viewer into a tangible, contemplative, and emotionally intense experience. Urbanism and domestic intimacy, vulnerability and resilience, past and present are intertwined in a complex, multifaceted dialogue. The exhibition creates a space where emotion, narrative, and material interact, revealing subtle connections between personal experience and broader cultural contexts.

Mengzhu Li: Maternal Intimacy

Born in Sichuan, Mengzhu Li works between China and the UK. She is a photographer and artist exploring motherhood, intergenerational memory, and psychology. Educated at London College of Communication, Li sees photography as a performative act—a scene to express trauma, grief, vulnerability, and, above all, tenderness.

The Mother’s Daughter project arose after the death of her father, which increased tension in the remaining mother-daughter relationship. Through staged photos and text, Li captures gestures balanced between protection and restraint—hands that are simultaneously hugged and held. Her work is not a confession, but a dance of feelings: a cartography of emotions through posture, space, and the play of light and shadow. Li emphasizes that art should ask questions, not give answers. Her work gently challenges the viewer, even in seemingly safe relationships, for example, between mother and daughter. This quiet tension defines the strength of her images: intimacy can be disturbing, and love always contains an element of fear.

In Making, the daughter’s face is partially covered by a red thread wrapped around her, while the mother rises above, continuing the weaving. Here, intimacy becomes a metaphor for care that both limits and nurtures. Li transforms sorrow and tenderness into visual language, creating space for reflection.

Among her previous projects are Between Intimacy and Estrangement (online exhibition at Barbagelata Contemporary Art Foundation), Dreams and Nightmares at Boomer Gallery, and Conceptual Erasure at Blank Canvas Fulham. In all these works, Li explores the fragility, depth, and complexity of family ties.

Li’s photography serves both as an intimate portrait and an exploration of space. Each composition guides the viewer’s gaze and movement, turning home interiors into platforms for reflecting on care, loss, and emotional labor. Her work shows how personal history can acquire a universal resonance, prompting viewers to think about their own intimacy, affection, and vulnerability.

Jiaxin Chen: Urban Poetics

Born in Hong Kong, Jiaxin Chen works between London and Fujian Province. She shifts attention from home to urban space, exploring city life and material culture through a mix of photography and craft practices. Chen recycles the South Chinese tradition of weaving Yongchun paper, combining it with modern photography to create translucent lattice structures that blur the boundaries between image and surface.

In the series City Within a City: Folded Lights of Hong Kong, the city appears as a multi-layered palimpsest. Skyscrapers and streets intertwine in grids, creating spaces that are both material and ephemeral. Light refracts through the paper, casting shadows that echo the rhythm of city life.

The surface of her photographs becomes a metaphor for cultural layering, where traditions, memory, and modernity converge. For Chen, photography is not a window onto the world, but a fabric of perception—flexible, porous, and responsive to light. Critics note that it “turns photography into a tactile hybrid form, where digital pixels meet manual weaving, creating a visual paradox where past and present harmoniously merge into a single whole.”

For Chen, materiality is not just a technique but a study of the city’s transient nature. Her urban landscapes are filled with both nostalgia and immediacy, reflecting Hong Kong’s past and present. The interaction of digital photography and hand weaving creates a poetic tension between the fleeting and the eternal, showing how memory and environment coexist. Her work encourages viewers to perceive the city as a living, breathing organism reflecting human vulnerability.

Materiality and Emotional Resonance

Materiality is central to both artists but manifests differently. In Li’s photographs, emotional traces abound, while text, installations, and performative elements expand the frame into encounters with care and intimacy. Fabrics, threads, and veils recur like motifs, emphasizing the oscillation between closeness and distance, presence and absence, understanding and misunderstanding.

Chen uses material as visual language, combining photochemistry and paper weaving into a “grammar” where light and surface store memory. The blue tones of cyanotype and the golden hues of hand-weaving convey Hong Kong’s variability—transparency and haze, simplicity and layering. Both artists digitize emotional and cultural memory, transforming it into material form: Li’s interiors radiate warmth without external brightness, while Chen’s landscapes flicker refracted by light yet reflect a cool detachment.

Dialogue Between Intimacy and Urbanism

The works of Li and Chen, when placed in proximity, form a dialogue of “contrasting proportions.” Li’s intimate interiors resonate with Chen’s radiant urban grids, demonstrating the interplay between the personal and the public. Maternal whispers echo city hums.

Audience reactions confirm the significance of this curatorial approach: many note the sense of synchronicity in gestures, textures, and light, which exist beyond cultural and linguistic barriers. The exhibition demonstrates how curation can transform emotional worlds and translate intimate experiences into universal stories.

Echoes Between Us is rooted in the poetics of relationships. Together, the artists create a spectrum of experiences—from deeply personal to collective—showing how identity and memory are continuously formed, destroyed, and re-created depending on context, relationships, and material embodiment.

The exhibition does not seek to resolve internal tensions; on the contrary, it preserves them as active spaces where viewers encounter the gaps between gesture, tactility, and narrative. This tension underscores the project’s core idea: identity, care, and urban consciousness are inextricably linked and constantly

reconsidered.

Echoes Between Us: The City Breathes, Mother’s Daughter resonates not through a single image or narrative, but through rhythm, texture, and harmony. Li’s maternal gestures quietly respond beneath Chen’s interwoven cityscape, leaving marks on memory. Love, loss, memory, and urban life enter a dialogue, demonstrating how contemporary art translates complex human experiences into aesthetic and emotional resonance accessible to all.

For audiences, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to immerse themselves deeply in the poetics of female experience, intercultural identity, and the translation of emotions into material form. Zhou’s curatorial practice emphasizes the inextricable connection between artists, audiences, and the world around them.