I wield metaphors to reveal the truth. Infinite metaphors.
There will always be one able to reach one’s heart.
A flash of light—not seen, but radiating from within.
You know you are this light.
–Shuo Hao, huile de vitre (2025)
Can glass become oil? Can flowers placed on a wounded body turn into blood? Can you wash away your burning secrets in the cool water of a pond? Play ping-pong with a mirror-paddle? Blow soap bubbles in the sun?
In Shuo Hao’s work, painting and poetry intertwine. Huile de vitre (Glass Oil)—the title of both the exhibition and the accompanying collection of short stories—encapsulates this bond between image and language: at the threshold between the visible and the invisible, between word and silence—where intuition precedes meaning and where hope or miracle may emerge. From these imaginary or seemingly futile gestures, devoid of any apparent effectiveness, arise a quiet beauty and the possibility of inner repair.
The term comes from an ancient belief mentioned by French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard in The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938): glass was thought to contain fire, and huile de vitre—or vitriol—was believed to derive from it. Shuo Hao turns it into an alchemical metaphor: an imaginary transmutation, an unreal substance where fluid and solid, matter and spirit, intersect to bring forth what eludes the surface.
Born in China and based in France for several years, Shuo Hao marks with this exhibition a transition toward a cross-disciplinary approach: paintings, texts, furniture, and found objects form a coherent whole—an attentive space where materials, gestures, and words enter into dialogue.
Conceived as a rite, the exhibition draws inspiration from the Yi Jing (Book of Changes), a foundational Taoist text that envisions the world as in perpetual transformation. Each work corresponds to one of the eight trigrams of the Yi Jing (a symbol composed of three lines—solid for Yang, broken for Yin), linked to a cosmic force, a season, a cardinal point. The space, designed by Shuo Hao as an energetic map, becomes the medium for signs in motion, a shifting balance between opposites—Yin and Yang, full and empty, elements, directions, cycles. The gaze moves freely through it, recomposing narratives from clues scattered within a reimagined domestic universe.
Shuo Hao’s imagination is hybrid and embodied. She combines her dreams, grief, and visions with Greek and Christian mythological figures: Persephone abducted, Saint Agatha martyred, Actaeon transformed into a stag, Leda raped by Zeus turned into a swan, Aphrodite and Adonis, Icarus, Cerberus, and the Sphinx. All point to moments of upheaval—those instants of rupture when metamorphosis, sacrifice, or downfall erupt. Here, fire is latent. It burns in the tension between apparition and erasure. The works become zones of passage— between human and animal, between worlds, between pain and transfiguration.
The narrative, like the image, is never linear. Motifs dissolve and redistribute themselves throughout the works. What matters is the symbolic charge—the potential for transformation contained in every detail. Each piece opens a breach, becoming a threshold where the gaze wanders and regenerates, in a ritual without beginning or end. The viewer moves among objects that have become doorways to the invisible or the inner self.
This approach echoes pyroscapulomancy, an ancient divinatory technique in which cracks caused by fire on bones or turtle shells were read as signs. The sinologist Léon Vandermeersch points out that Chinese writing was born not to transcribe speech, but to draw divination. Similarly, in Shuo Hao’s work, the object—painted or recomposed—becomes a living trace, a vessel for intuition. Here, fire is metaphorical yet active: it alters, reveals, and inscribes signs in the material, awaiting decipherment.
Her works combine painting with found objects—antique furniture, items gleaned from flea markets. Some date back to the 18th century, others are worthless. She cuts them apart, flips them over, diverts them from their function: a table becomes a pedestal, a drawer becomes an ear. The assemblage becomes an attempt at repair—not to restore, but to bring forth. Her aesthetics of reuse play with memory and transformation. Totems, folding screens, and altars carry as much of the past as they do of the future. She calls herself a shaman, an interpreter. She observes and recomposes, listens and invents fictions in old notebooks. Huile de vitre (in Mandarin and English) brings together fifty short texts related to the works—not as a catalog or counterpoint, but as a source, a parallel layer to the exhibition.
Her painting unfolds in sudden appearances. She summons dense forms, legendary creatures, symbolic animals: vases, hourglasses, candles, pomegranates, sphinxes, ouroboros snakes. Bodies are fragmented, objects inhabited by a muted force. The colors are lunar: milky whites, silvery grays, deep blues, extinguished reds. Orifices, hollows, interstices—shells, ears, half-open flowers—punctuate the works like so many passageways to the invisible. Her technique at times recalls the ornamental lines of a 19th-century trumeau or cameo, or the surrealist painting of a Magritte or a Leonor Fini.
Shuo Hao does not seek to explain. She shapes a symbolic place of care, a chapel without dogma where dislocated forms regain an active power. Matter is probed as in a silent psychoanalysis.
The exhibition is marked by mourning: the recent death of her closest friend. A final work is dedicated to him—a three-panel folding screen, a number symbolic in Taoism, signifying infinity and the shared date of their birthdays. This gesture completes the ritual: Huile de vitre becomes a place of remembrance, a threshold where the dead accompany the living.
More than just a title, huile de vitre becomes a matrix-image, poetic matter. The exhibition does not construct a closed world. It lets fractures show through. It progresses through shifts, exploring what remains in objects, what circulates in silence. Shuo Hao composes a space where loss becomes presence, where the gesture composes a form of self-healing, and where, within the glass, a glimmer persists.
–Victoria Jonathan
