Amid the buzz of the London Art Fair, Ripple Verse Gallery invites you into a quieter conversation. Bringing together the works of Ni Xuemin, Orly Kritzman, Gabriela Schutz, and Yu Lili, this exhibition unfolds at the volatile juncture between relational intimacy and estrangement.

What binds these four artists is a shared insistence on slowness. Against a culture of immediacy and consumption, they invite the viewer to pause, to dwell, and to remain. This exhibition is not about grand declarations; it is about the subtle, often overlooked ways we connect, or fail to, across cultures and distances.

Orly Kritzman and Yu Lili anchor intimacy in the very Earth beneath our feet. Kritzman’s ceramics are deeply personal: red terracotta recalls childhood landscapes, while porcelain evokes the translucency of her life in London. Her works do not conceal their scars, instead, the acts of breaking and mending themselves become a vital part of the story.

Similarly, Yu Lili works with hand-ground minerals: lapis, malachite, quartz, reviving ancestral techniques associated with grotto murals. She arrests the process at the precise moment each crystal lattice remains intact—preserving colour not as surface phenomenon but as geological structure, transforming stone into a living, tactile memory.

While Orly and Yu turn to the ground, Gabriela Schutz and Ni Xuemin look at the modern spaces we move through. Gabriela’s paintings of people lost in their phones or standing in a transitional space capture a specific modern ache: the feeling of being physically there but mentally miles away. Her work is an act of resistance against the ‘skimming’ culture of the digital age.

This sense of ‘spatial unease’ carries into Ni Xuemin’s work. Through a surreal visual language and dreamlike architectural forms, he inquires the boundaries of private life: the walls we build, whether architectural or psychological, are often just illusions, shifting as we try to define where we end, and the rest of the world begins.

Intimacy isn't always about being close. Sometimes, it’s found in the grain of a pigment, the crack in a vase, or the quiet distance between two people in a crowded room. They invite us to inhabit that middle ground, the ‘third space’, where our differences finally begin to resonate.

Na An (Anna)

16 Jan, 2026