;ades and undiscovered islands. We encounter an inhabitable field for adventure, imagination, and contemplation. We slide into the realm of looking without knowing. Within this space, we are provoked to re-learn what it is to discover, observe, and have faith in what comes through.  When it gets to an unconscious sensitivity for harvesting, containing, and preserving, we thus enter the territory of a liberating and honest fiction where the story is ever ongoing— so simply phrased in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin:
 
‘Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/ belly/ box/ house/ medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterised either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.’ [2]
 

Image: Dien Berziga’s works at exhibition A Sack of Dirt © Catherine Li
 
The artists, too, are faithful to their personal experiences. Dien and James are playing the roles of archaeological excavators within their respective canvas territories, rather than mere conveyors of information. Dien’s laboriously handcrafted 3D printed frames, along with his experimentation with painterly and unpainterly materials, create an illusion of old master’s work using cutting-edge technology and promptly shatter it with tactless techniques. Through his intentional transformation of 3D prints, his works perhaps unintentionally mirror our contemporary condition, situated at the conjunction of the past and the future.
 
In James’ paintings, the collage textures and contemporary reinterpretations of historical references contextualise fairy tale narratives with a serious retrospection. The artist carries both a solemn sense of historical responsibility and a playful innocence simultaneously. We are reminded of our present thirst for truth, yet its infinite evasion of capture. Within the sensitivity of these two painters, who seem to independently travel the endless chambers of history in search of divining the present, we awake in a playground of innocence and full perception.  Echoing Catherine’s sentiment: it feels like returning to childhood; a time when one sits in the playground, free from external directives. Alone, with the freedom to be free, every element in the surroundings is alive and breathing—the shape of a stone, the vast sky, or the leaves that are blown away.
 

Image: Exhibition view of A Sack of Dirt © Catherine Li
 
In other words, taking a cue from Lang’s featured painting, we find the intriguing formation of an alchemical Rebis, a mythical body in which we are actually looking at, a body crafted by the myths of the past and the artist of the present. [3] Colours, structures, and pseudo-historical prompts entwine to form a net which reaches outwards and inwards, searching the connection of past and present. It’s a simula