AYE Gallery is pleased to present Cai Jin’s solo exhibition “Flowers in Bodily Improvisation,” on view from December 14, 2025 to February 14, 2026.
In Cai Jin’s practice, flowers are never inert still life but extensions of the body and metaphors of consciousness. Since her seminal Canna series of the 1990s, she has interwoven vegetal forms with the fragility, desire, and decay of the human body. Blossoms oscillate between blooming and withering, becoming charged energy forms that exist between growth and dissolution. This exhibition focuses on Cai Jin’s ongoing exploration of the “body–flower” theme in oil painting, revealing how she treats painting as an extension of bodily perception: the flow of color mirrors the rhythm of breath, and the accumulation of strokes echoes the tension and release of muscle.

“Bodily improvisation” here is not just a metaphor borrowed from dance but a working method. The artist’s gestures—spiraling, pausing, falling—resonate with the kinesthetic listening of improvisational movement, allowing the image to remain in continual formation between stillness and flow. In this process, flowers no longer point to nature; they emerge as forms co-constructed by body and canvas, awakening sensory experience with an almost musical rhythm.

From the watershed of the Canna works to her current investigations into flowers and landscapes, Cai Jin returns to the most primal terrain of her imagery. Charged with a renewed sense of anticipation, she reopens her painterly inquiry into life, time, and desire.