Constructs of Belonging
constructs of belonging
E.SCAPE Shanghai
2026.03.13 – 04.14
The need to feel at home and belong is universal. It shapes how we connect, communicate, and live. This fundamental necessity manifests across familial, cultural, political, and religious groups, and even between those who challenge such structures. When there is no sense of belonging, our capacity to care and foster social responsibility diminishes.
As cultures interweave and the boundaries between people become increasingly complex, dealing with change requires a deeper understanding and empathy towards how individual perspectives of belonging shape people’s actions and beliefs. Attuning to the shared need to belong, rather than judging one modus against the other, can help us better navigate societal differences and conflicts.
For the 2026 residency at E. Scape Foundation, based on the theme of home, Guo Guozhu, a Xiamen-based photographer, and Angela Lyn, a Swiss-based, Anglo-Chinese visual artist, engage with the rooms and spaces of the English Villa, which currently houses the foundation. Together, the two artists bring their work into dialogue around the theme of home and belonging. Guo’s photographs and Lyn’s cross-media installations resonate with shared empathy. Despite their differences in generation and medium, and the fact that they live on two different continents, their sensitive observations reflect both the personal and the universal.
1st floor
while we search
In the Light Room, Lyn’s silk work, mirage 2025, derived from her large cedar and landscape paintings, evokes an ethereal sense of belonging. You don’t get what you see: you don’t see what you get. The silk veils bearing trees and mountains become the habitat for her suspended wanderers III and IV, knotted and shaped with a presence that suggests both permanence and change. In turn, Guo’s photographs of deserted homesteads, abandoned during urbanisation and repossessed by nature in ongoing transformation, deepen this atmosphere. Lyn’s giant grasshopper gives an eerie note of ancestral presence, a poignant reminder of the brevity of human ownership and a brief revisiting of what once was.
In the Piano Room, remnants of homes still faintly echo the people to whom they once belonged. Lyn’s gigantic dress, almost a building itself, houses the rooms of a baroque villa she installed with her art in her 2022 exhibition on the edge of time, at the Villa Arconati-FAR, in Milan, Italy. Together, both artists evoke an intimate sense of inhabitance, reflected in the small things that shape our lives: a presence that, amid today’s consumption, often goes amiss.
Both artists pose the question: what remains? Whether it is Guo’s photographs of leftover cups, lost shoes, or a misplaced shirt, or Lyn’s portrait of a luminous tassel, or a fragment of a dress, both artists engage with traces of human existence and the differences they make within the shifting realities in which they exist.
2nd floor
while we sleep
On the second floor, Lyn and Guo address the theme of sleep. While stationary in our beds, the elusive mind is free to wander and drift through the gateways of the subconscious. Guo’s disconcerting bedroom scenes and Lyn’s transformation of materials create imagery that is both surreal and familiar. Together, the two artists seem to inhabit the same dream, reflecting the fragilities and ambiguities intrinsic to human life.
3rd floor
while we wonder
In the attic, the two artists create a dialogue with nature, marking a relinquishment of the world of rooms, daily life and things that constitute a home. A calling back to nature and a primal state of belonging, Guo’s works from his series Mr Plant are a silent attunement with plants and trees, while Lyn combines a group of works titled deep in the forest, from a family garden, an arm’s reach, lifeline and mars, creating an ode to the human longing to be at one with the pulse of life itself beyond the constraints of the human condition.
The two artists align without conversation. Yet an attentive visual exchange forms the basis for a palpable, sincere, and articulate connection between them. It is an attempt to navigate the mystery of existence, whether we are on one side of the globe or the other. The empathy that arises when this becomes a shared experience is perhaps what Guo and Lyn identify as a sense of home and belonging.
Angela Lyn with Guo Guozhu, February , 2026