Layer Study: Sampling and mediation
INSTALLATION VIEWS
SELECTED WORKS
FOREWORD
Click Ten Gallery is pleased to present the second installment of Enactivism , titled Layer Study: Sampling and Mediation. The exhibition opens on August 27 and runs through October 26.
Enactivism emphasizes the process of artistic creation, resisting the reductive “objectification” of art into a singular finished product. Instead, the exhibition foregrounds the time and labor invested by artists in their working methods. Centering on the core concept of the “layer,” the show investigates how contemporary artists combine emotion, experience with inspiration and rational processes within this fundamental framework of painting/image-making—a synthesis that does not constrain creativity but rather activates serendipity and unpredictability in the act of making.
The layer is both a basic technical logic and a procedural step in artistic practice. Process and habit profoundly shape an artist’s conception and final outcome. Classical painting’s glazing techniques follow strict sequences, while modernist mixed-media approaches equally prioritize material properties and operational logic. With the rise of digital art—especially the widespread adoption of graphical software interfaces—the “layer” has become increasingly visible and systematized in broader visual culture, reshaping artists’ understanding of materiality, technology, and the act of painting itself.
The works on view exemplify multi-layered labor: the artist’s thought and toil accumulate like geological strata. On the canvas surface, diachronic and synchronic traces flicker in dialogue, weaving a vision of existence. Painting thus reveals the fragility of being—a struggle to reclaim unity amid contradiction and fragmentation.
Artists working with multi-layered processes begin by extensively sampling from the visual world, drawing from wildly diverse sources: natural phenomena, ancient texts, engravings, mass media, art historical images, street graffiti, smartphone snapshots, and more. They patiently construct bridges between images, styles, and personal experience, while allowing private narratives to resonate universally—as both provocation and critique.
To achieve embodied effects with these heterogeneous materials, artists must mediate along two key axes:
- Negotiating between new technologies and historical art, ensuring that painting remains open yet perceptually stable, forging new languages through technical synthesis.
- Reconciling technology with artistic agency, metabolizing external tools like bees transforming nectar into honey—continually internalizing and reinventing techniques to expand their expressive toolkit.
Thus, mediation becomes an act of self-orientation within history, a necessary coupling of the artist’s complexity with technological systems.
Layer Study offers a framework for analyzing the impulse to enactive. Through actions—covering, revealing, quoting, distorting, brushing, outlining, engraving, interrupting, splashing, modeling, collaging, burning—the creator’s instinct sparks flashes of insight in the fog of time.