Hu Xiaoyuan, born in Harbin in 1977 and graduated from Central Academy of Fine Art in 2002, co-founder of the N12 Art Group with Song Kun, Xiaofei Chou, Guangle Wang and Hualing Xu etc. She has participated in many art exhibitions at home and abroad on multiple occasions. Her exhibitions included paintings, concepts, art decorations and more. Summer Solstice at Michael Ku Gallery is probably here to probe into the subject of ‘COURSE’. This exhibition is comprised of three categories: Summer Solstice, Wood, and Glimmer. Summer Solstice shows an array of objects. In the drawer of a school desk set, an item indispensable in one’s childhood life, lies a cicada shell. Cicadas stay as lava in most of their lives. They fight hard to survive, yet their adult life after ecdysis is actually very short. Comparing it to the school desk in the art work, perhaps human life can be cross related? Another theme is ‘Glimmer’. It can be described as a series of drawings displayed on light boxes. In this series of art works, on the canvases made from raw silk, moments of the artist’s childhood life were captured, giving out a sense that different points of time are being misplaced and yet as if they have co-existed. The ticking sound from inside the light boxes seems to have integrated the aeriform time with the time that comes with a shape. ‘Wood’ is a series where wood grains (real wood grain) were drawn on the canvases made from raw silk. A piece of real wood is wrapped inside each silk canvas with its real wood grains being buried under silk. On every piece of art work in this series, the hand-painted wood grains and the real ones share some resemblance, but the two are not identical. This is like the double faces a man may show at the same time. All three series of art work are connected to time (wood grain manifests the age of the wood, a record of the time gone past). 19 Jun, the first day of exhibition, is only a few days away from the Summer Solstice, the longest day of a year. We would like to hold the exhibition near the Summer Solstice, to probe into the truth, the essence of time and life with the audience.