Zhenzhen Tian
Soft Data:
Curated by Lyra Tian | Co-curated by Erika Song
In an age where data defines truth and algorithms dictate rhythm, Soft Data: arrives as a quiet, persistent interruption — a refusal to be fully decoded.
Curated by Lyra Tian and co-curated by Erika Song, Soft Data: brings together 16 artists whose practices defy linear logic and precision. Their works hum with ambiguity, dissonance, emotional residue, and a resistance to quantification. Rather than seek clarity, this exhibition embraces the uncertain, the intuitive, the glitch — moments where communication breaks down and something more human leaks through. From distorted transmissions and unstable forms to contemplative slowness, each piece embodies one or more of the four guiding principles of the exhibition: uncertain language, unusual data, slow rhythm, and a persistent desire to feel the world beyond the algorithm. The exhibition’s strength lies in its refusal to resolve, inviting viewers to stay in liminal states,to pause inside transitions, and to honor emotional data as its own kind of intelligence.
With Soft Data:, Lyra Tian and Erika Song have created a space that doesn’t demand understanding, but presence. It is a call to slow down, feel more, and listen to what can’t be graphed.
Artists:
Alex Steggles · Cristian Fernandez Ocampo · Clara Smith · Dawei Li · Gabrielle Llewellin · Jena Huang · Jiawen Zin Zhang · Josefina Sumar · Judy Clarkson · Michalis Karaiskos · Rui Tao · Wonyoung Shim · Xiaohan Luo · Xinyue Gao · Zhenzhen Tian
Alex Steggles
Candy- 2024- Oil on canvas- 20 x 25cm
£380
My practice involves using isolated moments from archival and personal sources to make paintings about memory, light and performance. By removing images from their original contexts and presenting them in series with one another, I aim to create connections informed by repeated motifs, composition and form. The process of selecting my subject matter is characterised by periods of deliberate research, as well as remaining open to images that appear to me when not actively searching for source imagery. Often, it will be the luminosity of an image that attracts me to it, and intentional emphasis is placed on the play of light in the eventual painting that is produced. I'm interested in the iconography of performance, and use this to explore themes of identity, illusion and spectacle. A hazy atmospheric undertone is sustained across the work, with which I aim to bring about feelings of temporal stillness and narrative ambiguity.
Clara Smith
Pine tree- 2025- Oil on canvas- 15 x 17cm
£120
Clara Smith (b.2000) is a south London based oil painter. These works are built up slowly, rendering quiet moments lightly remembered through layers of translucent wax and broken colour. She is most interested in fragmented light and intimate details in the city often overlooked.
Cristian Fernandez Ocampo
untitled- 2025- oil, beeswax and marble dust on 2 aluminum panels with wooden mount- 8cm x 88cm (two panels, each 8x44cm)
£3000
Cristián F Ocampo is a multidisciplinary artist whose work delves into the interplay of flatness, materiality, and rhythm. He is deeply fascinated by the residual beauty found in materials and the revelation that occurs through concealment. Operating at the intersection of sincerity and irony, Ocampo's practice seeks to unearth the emotional resonance of forms and the unique magic each material possesses when paired or layered in specific ways. Drawing inspiration from personal writings, urban aesthetics, and historical references, his work explores themes of repetition, visual rhythm, and the tension between positive and negative space.
Gabrielle Llewellin
Imaging the Tacit Dimension: Urwesen (Primordial Essence and Entity)- Giclee Print- A3 image A2 framed
- 2025
NFS
Urwesen (German) , alludes to a fundamental, foundational, or primordial entity or essence. In philosophical and theological contexts, it raises concepts of the ever present origin or the ultimate source of existence and presides in this work as a Sentinel…..a watcher.
Jena Huang
The Last Verse- 2025- Oil on canvas- 40 x 50cm
£488
Bio Junnan Huang (b. 1997, Jilin, China) is a London-based artist working across oil painting and Chinese ink traditions. She earned her BA in Fine Art Painting (2019) and MA in Chinese Painting (2022) at Sichuan Conservatory of Music, followed by an MA in Painting from Camberwell College of Arts (2023). Mentored by Yan Zi, her early transition from Western to Eastern techniques ignited a lifelong exploration of cultural hybridity. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and China, including Camberwell's *MA Degree Show* (2023), *Ephemeral Radicals* (London, 2024), and *Royal Watercolour Society 2024*. Currently developing her practice at SET Woolwich Studios, Huang's process bridges material experimentation with themes of transience, resilience, and the poetics of the mundane.
Jiawen Zin Zhang
The One Under 25- 50 x 70 cm each (four works in total)- A SET OF 150 TICKETS, RETOUCHED PASSPORT PHOTO, BFI UNDER 25 CERTIFICATE- 2021-till now
Discount card small
frame+ One single ticket
frame £380
One single ticket frame
£330
The artwork features a digitally altered passport photo reflecting an age under 25, a British Film Institute (BFI) membership card, and 200 cinema tickets. By modifying the age on the passport, the artist gains access to BFI's discounted £3 movie tickets for young audiences. This piece integrates multiple media, including photography, video, and installation, to explore themes of political and structural violence. Through non-violent, nonconfrontational, and rational approaches, it demonstrates how art can challenge institutional and capitalist structures. Furthermore, it examines the role of art in influencing policymakers and shaping public opinion, positioning it as a critical tool for exposing and critiquing social injustices and systemic violence.
Josefina Sumar
Leaks- 37.5 x 28 x 51 cm; 36 x 20 x41cm; 37 x 20 x 35 cm- Ceramic, Fabric (tights), Stuffing- 2025
NFS
Leaks (From the series Inners) Found objects, fabrics, stuffing 2025. Leaks is part of Inners, a series that explores the internal, the bodily, and what often remains unseen. In this installation, the floor becomes a site of escape. Three used ceramic pipes, worn by time, take on the form of bodies that fail in their function, unable to contain what moves through them. From within, soft, knotted, and tense shapes emerge, made from stuffed black tights. They resemble displaced organs, compressed emotions, or the residue of something that resists containment. Each piece seems to grow from its core, as if something hidden had finally found a way out. The work holds tension between opposites: hard and soft, industrial and organic, external and internal. There is no explosion. There is leakage, overflow. A quiet persistence that does not subside. That friction connects with certain human experiences: the effort to contain, ignore, or silence something that, sooner or later, inevitably finds a way to surface and flow as an act of release.
Judy Clarkson
Held- 2021, oil on canvas- 100 x 100cm
£3000
I was born in Harrogate, N. Yorks and graduated from St. Martin's School of Art in Fine Art in London where I still live. I work in oil on canvas, and also draw regularly from life, an essential part of my practice. The human face and figure are the main inspiration for my work, and through these subjects, I seek to portray the human condition. Prizes include the Platinum Award for the Cancer Feminine, 2022, the Judges Choice Prize in the Chaiya Art Awards 2021 and the Nude Category Award by the Artist Lounge Artist of the Year. In 2018 I won the Holly Bush Emerging Woman Painter Prize. I have also been shortlisted for the John Ruskin Prize 2019, The New Lights Art Prize 2020, 2022, and have exhibited in galleries such the Mall Galleries (Ing Discerning aEye, Society of Women Artists), Riverside Studios and the JD Malat Gallery, Mayfair.
Dawei Li
Perfect Facsimile- 2025- Digital installation- 2 x 2 x 2m
£2000
Dawei Li, digital installation artist, user experience designer. In his creation, he tends to express through the strong impact of contemporary technological media on the senses. He focuses on the field of information production, and recently he is very interested in the impact of artificial intelligence technology on the transformation of image production mode. He explores the power behind his image data through information processing or data collection, and explores the limitations of his technology by letting artificial intelligence expose the power and centrality behind image data. He tries to express through multi-sensory media. The goal is to externalize the implicit power changes and present them in an intuitive way In the latest project "Perfect Copying", through participatory writing installations, he reflects on the hegemonic narrative of images and the discipline of the senses. He collected controversial pictures from different periods in history and forced the audience to write the machine's interpretation of the image by having them wear gloves.
Michalis Karaiskos
In the Desert of Religion- Oil on linen- 60 x 40cm- 2024
£3000
An empty church interior rendered in quiet, reddish hues. The space is theatrically framed, yet devoid of figures — a stage without actors, a structure waiting to be believed in. Pews recede in measured rhythm. The altar glows faintly. What remains is architectural residue: the aesthetic logic of power, devotion, and control — softened by time, ambiguity, and doubt. A portrait of belief as absence.
Rui Tao
Guardian Angel- 40 x 22.5cm each (five works in total)- Photography- 2025
NFS
This work is inspired by a conversation with an elderly man—a grandfather—who lives with PTSD. As he recounted his memories of war and the relentless nightmares that followed, I was struck not only by the vividness of his trauma, but also by the fragility of memory itself.I sought to reconstruct his experience in a multidimensional space—visuals, and atmosphere—capturing the disorientation, fear, and emotional weight carried within his memories. Rather than offering a linear narrative, the piece unfolds like a series of encoded clues, inviting viewers to decipher and emotionally inhabit a past that is not their own. In inhabiting this reconstructed memory, each audience member is asked to imagine, to feel,
and to interpret—becoming both witness and participant in a story they never lived, yet might begin to understand.
Wonyoung Shim
Gate 27.39- 2025- Aluminum, Bolt, Acrylic, PLA- 23 x 35 x 90cm
NFS
Wonyoung Shim is an artist based between London and Seoul, working across installation, sculpture, and sound. Her practice attends to subtle disruptions in everyday perception, constructing immersive environments that loosen the automatisms of sensory experience through spatial tension and non-linear arrangements. She is drawn to the unstable ground between clarity and ambiguity, where latent sensations emerge and unarticulated experiences begin to take shape. By giving form to what lies beneath perception—often inaudible, unseen, or fleeting—Shim reveals thresholds of awareness and invites a slowed mode of attention. Her work follows ephemeral states that resist immediate comprehension, offering perceptual situations that prompt reflection on the act of noticing itself. Shim is currently pursuing an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art in London.
Qingran Liu
《The Non-returnable One: A Study of memory based on photographic 》Provenance1- monofilament/wood- 40 x 45 x 5cm- 2024.8
￡500
“Provenance 1” explores the fragile boundary between object and subject, emotion and memory. Based on a childhood photograph, the work reflects on how identity is shaped through social placement—like furniture arranged in a room. The floating textile print and time-based knitting resist fixed meaning, evoking a sense of gentle instability. In the context of “Soft Data:”, this piece becomes a quiet transmission—an emotional signal formed outside algorithmic logic. It offers not clarity, but sensation; not precision, but presence. “Provenance 1” is a soft loop of memory, growth, and refusal to be fully decoded.
Xinyue Gao
On Pole- April 2025- Photography- variable
NFS
Influenced by Richard Billingham’s raw and intimate approach to image-making, Remi developed On Pole as a photographic exploration of control, vulnerability and embodied resistance. At the centre of the work is a single pole, both object and metaphor, around which dancers move, balance and strain. The project captures the evolving relationship between body and object, using movement as a language to express power, fragility and transition. Rather than staging scenes, Remi documents unscripted interactions, allowing the pole to become a compass, a boundary and a provocation. Shot on film, the photographs carry a raw, tactile quality that foregrounds emotional truth over technical polish. By embracing the grain and imperfection of analogue processes, Remi allows each image to feel grounded and immediate. The work sits between performance and photography, using the dancers' physical interactions to explore themes of identity, migration and resistance. In these suspended moments, gestures do not offer answers but open questions. On Poleasks viewers to reflect on what we cling to, what we resist, and how meaning can be shaped through movement.
Xiaohan Luo
If Clouds Know I- Print in photolithography- 2023- 60x20cm
NFS
Emotions Stirred Memories Aroused Time Condensed As I grow older, I realize increasingly that there is no such thing as a constant companion. People come and go, leaving traces and memories that are just simply words. So, I began to look at the clouds that are present and company all the time. For me, their forms are new and old every day. They weave in and out of my stories, shadowless and yet carrying my catharsis, troubles, and joys. Photography is an important medium through which I view the world. Through the quick and narrow eye of the camera, I give clouds a personal response in different emotional and spatial contexts, placing them in the same image. In each spot of the work, the cloud tells a hidden story of my encounter, reunion, and goodbye to it. I love it, but it doesn't always know.
Zhenzhen Tian
Light of the Dreamscape-2024- Acrylic, marker on canvas- 61x46cm
£700
The artwork ‘Light of the Dreamscape’ captures a surreal dreamscape where reality and fantasy are intricately intertwined. Elements such as the bed, the skeletal structure, the swan and the faint light of a candle come together to create a scene reminiscent of a dream. The work symbolises a journey into the depths of the subconscious in search of home. The swan represents the delicate life force, contrasting with the coldness of the skeleton. The dim candlelight embodies fragile hope, perhaps a fleeting glimmer of clarity in the darkness of the dream. This scene encapsulates my current emotional state - free and fragile, suggesting raw emotions and memories of home buried deep in the subconscious and untouched.