Bingyi: Maze of Mind
Dates: 02-22 November, 2025
SAG, 3rd Floor, 3 Zhong Shan Dong Yi Road, Shanghai
In Maze of Mind， Bingyi composes a journey of the human mind in a labyrinth of meaning, transformation, and transcendence-a continuous and meandering expedition, at once a psychological and cosmic voyage and an inquiry into how our mind works.
Bingyi uses ink and paper-specifically, the dryness of paper and the watery expression of ink-in such ways they becomes light and illumination. The exhibition is structured around four distinct yet interpenetrating dimensions expressing how the mind functions:
万物 - The Mind of All Things;
宇宙 - The Mind of the Universe;
空性 - Emptiness
神迹 - The Sublime Mind.
Each dimension forms a threshold that we cross, each painting or installation a signpost that we feel. Together, the four dimensions constitute the infinity of the mind, where we can walk, reflect in, and emerge anew.
Why Maze of Mind?
The notion of "Maze" and "Mind" are both critical.
Bingyi does not propose a linear, didactic path from A to B, but rather an architecture of consciousness that is labyrinthine, looping, branching and perhaps ultimately without exit.
In her practice, Bingyi engages the world-specifically, the land and weather-through massive site-specific scrolls. Through this process, she experiences awakening of mind as the "lightening" between world and cosmos, and the "body giving birth" to image.
Thus this maze is not to confuse but offers an invitation. The visitor wanders and meanders, sometimes lost, sometimes found, sometimes surprised by a sudden vista, sometimes immersed in reflective quiet. The artworks become rooms, corridors, and portals.
The Mind of the Artist and the Role of the Viewer
This exhibition is not passive viewing. As the maze is the mind of the viewer as much as the mind of the artist. Each person brings their own terrain of memory, desire, doubt, and hope. As you walk from the realm of things to the cosmos to emptiness to the sublime, you may be retracing your own maps of thought, religion, science, introspection, and wonder. In the end, the path is both external and internal. You are the maze walker, the exploring mind, the receptive heart.
Why It Matters Now
In a world ever prodded by technology, data, distraction and dis-location, Maze of Mind reminds us of what is primary: our heart in relation to all things, our brain in relation to the cosmos, our consciousness beyond form, and our being poised before the sublime.
It is a call to see the world not just as object but as partner, to remember that our smallness is held by the vastness of cosmos, to deepen our awareness of the groundless ground, and to let art open a threshold to something greater than ourselves.
The Mind of All Things
Mind begins with All Things. We sense the beat of wind, the rise of mountains, the whisper of trees as resonant with our own inner life. The artist's axiom "心即万物" (the heart is all things) declares that human mind is an expression of sensation that channels the life movement of every being on earth.
In this dimension, Bingyi's paintings radiate with vitality - life in its fullness and the inter-being of all forms.
The key force of mind in this dimension is SENSITIVITY, the direct experience that our consciousness is not isolated but connected within the wholeness of all beings.
The Mind of the Universe
Ascending from the world of all things, we arrive at the vastness of the universe. Bingyi draws a parallel: our brains-networked, luminous, dynamic-echo the cosmos with its stars, galaxies, and dark expanse.
Mind becomes Cosmos. The paintings extend the earlier land-and-weather works of long mountains and flowing ink into sky-fields, stellar webs, and elemental flows of energy: "脑即宇宙" means that our brain mirrors the universe. The paintings embody the awe of both infinity and intimacy at once.
The key force is LOVE. The universe is the first and true love of humankind, therefore love in the form of attraction to the cosmos enables us to embrace creativity and to transcend time and space.
Emptiness
The dimension of Emptiness pushes the human mind beyond time-and-space. In Buddhism, the realm of śūnyatā, emptiness, is not a nihilistic void but the ground for potential, or the birthplace for being and non-being. The mind of emptiness witnesses the arising of phenomena that dissolves duality of subject and object.
Mind beyond Time and Space. Bingyi sees emptiness as beyond or before the Universe, as the abundance that nurtures the world with energy and the miracle of creation.
The key force is MINDFULLNESS. The mind in this dimension is powerful but quiet. The art offers dwelling in stillness and an experience of the groundless ground of consciousness.
The Sublime Mind
Beyond mindfulness lies the realm of the sublime. "神迹" might be rendered as "miraculous traces" or "divine marks" but it means the mind that gives in to creation, that opens into mystery, that becomes the vessel of the numinous.
Mind as Becoming. Bingyi believes human consciousness becomes co-creator when fully awoken, collaborating with the ruling forces of existence. It is when we no longer observe the universe but participate in its becoming that the mind finally completes itself.
The key force is CREATIVITY. The maze ceases to be labyrinthine; it becomes a celebration, an expanse of reverence, astonishment and humility before the vastness of being.
The Temple of Mind - The Cathedral Within
At the heart of the labyrinth rises The Temple of Mind-a sanctuary, a cathedral, and a culmination of the journey.
At its center hangs the monumental Wanwu 万物 scroll, a 24-meter by 3-meter painting co-created with the land and weather of the sacred mountains of Longhu in 2013. This grand piece anchors the entire structure like the heart of a temple-vast, breathing, and alive.
Flanking Wanwu are five pairs of luminous panels from Bingyi's newest Lightning series completed this year also onsite in the Longhu Mountains precisely twelve years after Wanwu. Shimmering like celestial windows they connect past and present, body and spirit, earth and sky. Together they form the Cathedral of the Mind-the living spectrum of the Maze of Mind through all of its dimensions.
This temple reveals the decades Bingyi has devoted to studying the human mind-its architecture, its light, its divine potential.
It stands as both archive and oracle-the culmination of a journey where art, mind, and technology merge into one radiant continuum.
The Corridors - Maze of the Poetic Mind
Surrounding the Temple is a network of corridors-a Maze of Mind in the mode of Poetry.
These winding paths invite the viewer to wander, to lose and rediscover oneself, to experience the fluid rhythm of thought and emotion as architecture and words.
Within these corridors, one encounters hidden treasures - poetic fragments, visual riddles, imaginary wars, reflections, and avatars of Bingyi's consciousness. They are clues, not explanations, sensations, not conclusions.
