Art Shopping Paris: Between Skin and Structure – Reframing the Contemporary Gaze

Beneath the Louvre’s glass pyramid, the Carrousel du Louvre transforms into a subterranean stage where contemporary art meets the public with visceral immediacy. In this year’s spring edition of Art Shopping Paris, over 150 international galleries and artists gather under vaulted ceilings and polished stone to present a chorus of forms—paintings, sculptures, photographs, and installations—each ready for discovery and dialogue.

With a diverse audience ranging from seasoned collectors to curious wanderers, the fair cultivates a space where intimacy, materiality, and perception intertwine. In this dynamic setting, a group of emerging artists reframe the boundaries between body, memory, and illusion.

Cindy Yao’s Intuition presents a heart-shaped imprint where sensuality is embroidered into form, layering intimacy with power and vulnerability. Yingying Zheng’s Seeing Through builds a perceptual paradox through optical illusion, inviting the viewer to become an active participant in the act of seeing.

Jiayi Yu, working with experimental digital scanning, creates emotionally charged images that collapse the boundary between vision and touch—particularly within the context of queer Asian experience.

In I Poisoned You, Shunshun Qi draws inspiration from cinema, abstracting desire and seduction into a purple-hued pool of physical tension. Brandon Zhong’s photographic landscapes transform urban tunnels into existential corridors—spaces where time disorients and shadows become metaphors for inertia, memory, and escape.

Amid these explorations, Yvette Yujie Yang’s glass sculpture Ephemeral I No.8 emerges as a quiet meditation on time and transformation. Made through the technique of lampworking, the piece captures a moment of kinetic force held still—a form shaped by gravity, heat, and spontaneity. The dual nature of glass—its fluid beginnings and brittle permanence—becomes a metaphor for the Chinese notion of fleeting beauty.

In Yang’s hands, the ephemeral is not simply a passing moment but a state of tension between presence and absence, energy and stillness. Her work invites viewers to consider how we might hold space for impermanence without attempting to possess it.

This presentation is brought together in collaboration with Sol de Paris, a contemporary art gallery located in the heart of Le Marais, Paris. Committed to bridging Eastern and Western perspectives, Sol de Paris fosters dialogue across cultural borders through bold, cross-disciplinary exhibitions. More than a gallery, it serves as a platform for exchange—where emerging voices from China, France, and beyond are given room to converse, resonate, and be seen. Their presence at Art Shopping reflects a larger commitment: to cultivate a global artistic community that thrives on complexity, nuance, and innovation.

Together, these voices sketch a portrait of contemporary art that is intimate yet conceptual, structured yet fluid. Beneath the iconic Louvre, where histories converge and futures emerge, the artworks speak not only to personal vision but also to the collective pulse of an interconnected world. As we navigate the terrain between desire and detachment, illusion and truth, permanence and flux, we are reminded that art lives not in the resolution of these oppositions, but in the fragile space where they coexist.

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