编号223，《Blossom Mode》，2023，艺术微喷。
No.223, Blossom Mode, 2023, Photography with archival pigment print.
In contemporary visual culture, eroticism persists as an ambiguous force of resistance, oscillating between societal discipline and individual liberation. This exhibition focuses on the two-decade photographic practice of Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223), presenting over a hundred works that explore how desire functions as a subversive daily practice. Through sustained and saturated imagery, the artist documents the clandestine yet potent dialogues between bodies, nature, and everyday objects, revealing the erotic refractions that permeate these interactions.
The exhibition is loosely divided into three sections. In the first part, flowers, fruits, and bodies sprawl across the photographs, their boundaries dissolving. Through postures of probing, touching, wandering, and lifting, the textures of skin and plants interpenetrate, transforming mundane objects into metaphors for organs. The second section projects the connection between desire and life onto natural landscapes: flocks of birds,marching ant colonies, and waves enveloping human bodies no longer serve as mere aesthetic backgrounds but become charged vessels of desire, actively participating in the dissolution of subjectivity. The third part shifts focus to deeper emotional states and entangled desires: empty beds, sunset light filtering through curtains, the cold glare of fluorescent lamps, and the desolate gazes of youth—all of which point to the surplus generated between the excess and deprivation of desire, and the scorching solitude that follows fleeting intimacy.
As Georges Bataille states in Erotism: “What is always operative in eroticism is the dissolution of constituted forms within regulated social life.” This dissolution, which breaks the closed categories of individuality like waves merging and disappearing into one another, manifests in No.223’s photographic practice. His lens captures an intermediate zone where binaries—public and private, purity and taboo, nature and culture—lose their clarity. Within this ambiguous chaos, desire perpetually points toward the unattainable. It is precisely this pursuit of the impossible within passion that binds anxiety to exhilaration, pain to beauty.
Under the sunlight, there is no true intimacy. These moments of excitement, bodily play, and entangled desires are shared yet meticulously concealed under societal discipline. In an era where bodies are relentlessly commodified and pleasure is reduced to a compulsory performance, No.223’s work reminds us of an alternative possibility: to transcend our fragmented selves, no longer as isolated individuals stumbling toward death through incomprehensible contingencies, but as coherent beings—even if only for a fleeting instant.