“Of Self, Time, and Trembling Silence” is a solo exhibition by London-based artist Zhengwei Fan. Curated by Ziyi Xiong, the exhibition will run from 24 to 28 June 2025. It is a part of its ongoing programme supporting intimate and research-led artistic practices at Batsford Gallery.
Fan’s practice explores themes of unspeakable fear, trauma, resistance, and the limitation of perception through drawing. His work constructs quiet yet psychologically charged spaces, often emerging from personal experience, observation, and ecological reflection.
In these works, the self is not a fixed centre, but a series of temporal fragments—stretched, displaced, and overlapped in the process of introspective inquiry. This is an exhibition about looking inward, a meditation on the self and a challenge to the boundaries of visual visibility. Some pieces whisper to you; others trap you in their gaze, compelling a confrontation with your own unease.
Here, the artist renders a cartography of time—not as a linear progression of past, present, and future, but as a field of vortices, ruptures, and accumulation. Image, color, and structure operate as interwoven threads, collectively composing a subjectivity that is in perpetual becoming.
About the artist
Zhengwei Fan is a visual storyteller and illustrator whose work traverses memory, landscape, and emotional fragility through delicately constructed visual narratives. Working primarily in watercolour and pencil on paper, his practice centres on a quiet form of image-making that merges drawing with slow observation. His compositions often emerge from personal experiences of isolation, daily routine, and ecological vanishing, giving form to complex inner states with visual restraint.
His artistic approach draws from a kind of personal archaeology—where past travel, field research, and introspective observation converge into a visual language shaped by time and loss. Whether evoking the slow death of glaciers or the muted loneliness of office life, Fan’s work lingers at the intimate edge of the ephemeral and the archival. With a background in illustration and a sensitivity to narrative structure, he constructs intimate visual worlds where presence flickers and solitude quietly resonates.
About the curator
Ziyi Xiong is a London-based curator and cultural producer whose practice explores the poetics of materiality, memory, and the unseen. With a background spanning fine art and interdisciplinary research, she has curated exhibitions across the UK, China, America and Canada.
