Tim Budden × Yi-Chin Chen × Yin-Chen Li × Dustin London ＂Piecing Landscapes: Experience in Layers＂

Tim Budden 、Yi-Chin Chen 、 Yin-Chen Li 、 Dustin London

Jul 12 - Jul 27, 2025

gallery Unfold is pleased to present “Piecing Landscapes: Experience in Layers,” an group exhibition featuring four artists — Tim Budden, Yi-Chin Chen, Yin-Chen Li, and Dustin London — who come together across cultures and generations. Working in sculpture, drawing, painting, and ceramics, these artists employ traditional materials and media while also incorporating new methods and ideas, reconsidering the very nature of their respective modes of expression.

While each artist pays attention to the tradition of “landscape” as it has been regarded in both Western and Eastern art history — as imitation of nature or an abstraction of ideals — they also draw out its potential by focusing on its shifting, fluid, multilayered, and multifaceted nature.

Tim Budden, who creates works that merge Eastern paper-cutting with Western sculptural techniques, takes inspiration from the act of viewing scholar’s rocks. He expresses the accumulation of time and the flow of thought through paper that overlaps and carries intentional perforations. Through processes such as cutting, burning, and coloring the paper, he transforms the flat surface into a sculptural form, tracing changes in both natural and emotional landscapes. In contrast to this contemplative approach, Yi-Chin Chen’s new series of torn-paper works for this exhibition captures scenes from everyday life through the spontaneous act of tearing paper. For Chen, landscapes are not necessarily grand or awe-inspiring; rather, they are attempts to reinterpret familiar places from fresh perspectives, evoking a sense of playful curiosity.

Dustin London, also reinterpreting everyday scenery, draws on his residency experience in Kyoto. He incorporates the Japanese garden design concept of mie-kakure (見え隠れ、hide and reveal) into his abstract pictorial compositions. Using faintly colored pencil strokes and rough textures, he depicts intersections of temples, gardens, paths, and stone pavements, creating a gentle yet rhythmical visual flow. The tension within the rhythm of landscapes reaches a peak in the ceramic works of Yin-Chen Li. She views the transformation of materials from underdrawing to completion as a narrative told by the matter itself. Her works balance delicacy with boldness, fragility with sharpness, and seek to capture the “landscape” of material through both visual and tactile dimensions.

Rather than treating concepts such as “layering/permeation,” “fluidity/fixity,” “surface/depth,” or “image/texture” as binary oppositions, the landscapes these artists create move freely across multiple axes, lightly transcending the boundaries of genre and tradition. Instead of merely reproducing external landscapes, they reflect everyday experiences like wandering and travel through introspective “inner landscapes,” inviting viewers to shift from observation to contemplation, from the micro to the macro.

We warmly invite you to take this opportunity to experience the exhibition.

Text｜Unfold Contemporary