Seeing with Eyes Closed: Art Through the Lens of Architecture

In our habitual way of looking, a painting appears to be a clearly defined object: the viewer stands outside the picture, directing their gaze toward its surface.

Imagine a black swan drifting across a lake at night. Dense darkness dissolves all distinctions, and the swan’s silhouette slowly emerges from a trembling glow. At this moment, the image is no longer an object to be looked at, nor is the world something that stands in opposition to us. Instead, everything awakens into a place that can be listened to—a psychological, resonant space.

Throughout Zhang Miao’s painting practice, space has remained a recurring subject of inquiry. The relationships between architecture, place, and image are continuously reconfigured and unfolded within his paintings. His long-standing engagement with architectural thinking has become a driving force behind his practice, where painting is no longer merely a surface of representation, but an exploration of perception, spatial experience, and the act of seeing itself.

For many years, Zhang Miao has been interested in the conceptual intersections between architecture and art. For him, architecture is not simply a physical form or functional structure, but a way of organising vision and experience. When we stand before a painting, the seemingly stable relationship between subject and object quietly begins to dissolve. The viewer and the viewed, inner consciousness and the external world, continually intersect in the very moment of perception. Painting therefore ceases to be a passive object of display, becoming instead a space capable of activating experience, evoking memory, and generating association.

Presented under the title”Seeing with Eyes Closed: Art Through the Lens of Architecture”, this edition of the “Rehearsal#5：Zhang Miao” Public Programme invites participants to reconsider the relationship between painting and space from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on his artistic practice and related theoretical texts, Zhang Miao will reflect on his understanding of seeing in painting. When vision is no longer simply directed toward the external world, but unfolds as a structure of experience between body and consciousness, new connections between art and architecture may begin to emerge.

Approaching the discussion from the perspectives of architectural theory and artistic practice, the invited speakers will explore spatial experience, pictorial structures, and architectural thinking in contemporary art. Through dialogue, we may arrive at a new understanding of painting as a spatial event, and ask whether, once seeing is no longer dependent on vision alone, art can offer us another way of understanding the world.

We warmly invite you to join us at Taikang Art Museum. Alongside your visit to “Rehearsal #5: Zhang Miao”, we welcome you to take part in this conversation on art and architecture, and to reopen new possibilities for imagining space, images, and perceptual experience through dialogue.