AN ENCOUNTER WITH BUGS: ZHU YINGCHUN’S BOOKS AND BUGS
虫逢：朱赢椿的书与虫

Hefei Contemporary Art Museum

20.5.2023 – 3.7.2023

Following its debut at Eslite Spectrum Suzhou, An Encounter with Bugs continued its journey to Hefei Contemporary Art Museum. While the core works and curatorial narrative remained unchanged, the transition from a bookstore setting to a museum space created a new context for reflection—allowing for deeper engagement with the visual, poetic, and philosophical dimensions of Zhu’s practice. 

The exhibition features Zhu Yingchun’s decade-long Bug Series, a poetic record of life’s entropy created in collaboration with twelve bugs. With keen observation and subtle craftsmanship, Zhu collects and preserves the marks made by bugs, transforming these tiny traces into artworks that challenge the boundaries between human creativity and nature’s spontaneity. 

Again structured in three chapters—from careful observation, to poetic deconstruction, to immersive co-existence—the exhibition in Hefei offers a more expansive space to contemplate the interconnectedness between species, language, and perception. Zhu's work resists human logic and causality, and instead invites endless interpretation, as if revealing divine signals in randomness.

Rather than a repetition, this second presentation builds upon the dialogue sparked in Suzhou, deepening our understanding of Zhu's approach. It is an ongoing response to a shared question: how might we perceive the world if we pause, observe, and think like bugs?