Artist: Geng Dayou

Exhibition: Tai

Duration: June 6 – July 31, 2026 

Opening: 10:00 AM, Saturday, June 6, 2026

Live Streaming: 3:00 PM, Saturday, June 6, 2026

 

 

What is a tai? It is the balcony, the kitchen counter, the windowsill in a Chinese home. It is the village opera stage, the tea tray on the table, the prayer platform before a temple. A tai is never large — just big enough for one person to stand on, sit down, or kneel. It has no roof, yet it is where ordinary people do their daily practice. You don't need to retreat into the mountains or take monastic vows. All it takes is standing before your own tai, spacing out for a moment, sipping a cup of tea, lighting a cigarette — and in that instant, the world recedes by a meter.

 

Jung said that a person needs a temenos — a sacred precinct — to become whole. On the arch of his own house he carved a line in Latin: "Called or not called, the god will be present." That was his tai. And the Chinese have long had an even plainer word for it: lingtai（灵台） — the inner altar. Not a religious shrine, but that small, lucid corner of the mind where one answers to no one but oneself.

 

Geng Dayou brings together stainless steel, wool, and solid wood — the hardest metal touching the softest fiber. His materials are never neutral: cold and warm, hard and soft, heavy and light — these material relations act directly on the body's perception, touching something primal: a natural materialist worldview inscribed in the flesh. His works are themselves a series of tai, places where the body comes to a halt and reacquaints itself with its own weight and temperature.

 

Geng has carried this tai into a century-old church in Jingxing. Built in 1931, the church is stone through and through, its load-bearing columns round. Visitors move around these columns as they view the exhibition — the columns are round, and the works gathered around them are round as well. This is no coincidence. The viewer circling the columns is not a passive spectator: every turn is a tiny deviation. Geng traces this deviation back to the accidental swerve of atoms in Lucretius — the clinamen — that infinitesimal break in the chain of cause and effect, which is precisely where freedom and meaning are born.

 

June 6 — the death anniversary of Carl Gustav Jung. A village church. A ring of viewers circling stone columns. A set of numbers waiting to be recognized. The tai has never been far away. It waits in the most ordinary places, ready for someone to step onto it, to feel that small patch of solid ground beneath their feet. But Geng Dayou says: "Even the most unshakable foundation is born from the order of contingency."

 

"And we are living, right now, beneath a miracle."

 

 

ABOUT ARTIST

 

Geng Dayou (b. 1998, Zibo, Shandong) currently lives and works in Shanghai. He holds a BSc in Psychology from King's College London and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Sotheby's Institute of Art, London. His unconventional educational trajectory—spanning psychology and pure theory—has sharpened his sensitivity to the hidden emotional structures and collective memories that permeate public life. His conceptual practice moves across installation, moving image, sound, and video games, constructing situations through a theatrical language of absurdist humor to distill the paradoxes at the heart of modernity.

 

Solo Exhibition: Tai, Hunsand Space (Shijiazhuang) (Shijiazhuang, 2026). "When No One is Around, Dance Gracefully" was held at ShanghArt (Shanghai, 2023). Erewhon （Web，2022），Eternal Recerrence，33ml-offspace（Shanghai，2021）. Group Exhibition: H+ Xu Chongzhi Former Residence (Shanghai, 2025) ,Empathy Museum (Hangzhou, 2025), Center Art Museum (Hangzhou 2024), Ws Space x Shanghart (Shanghai, 2023), East Gallery (Nanjing, 2023), Baidu Xirang (Online, 2022), SpaceArtDao (Online, 2022) , Vault-Fringe Future Festival (London, 2021), Guardian Art Center (Beijing, 2021), Three Shadows Photography Art Center (Beijing, 2021) , All Club (Shanghai, 2021), Fibre（Shanghai, 2021), Powerlong Art Museum (Shanghai, 2021) , CouttsArt Center (Shanghai，2021), Slime Engine (Online，2021) ,The Coningsby Gallery (London, 2020) etc.

 

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艺术家：耿大有

展览：台

展期：2026年6月6日—7月31日

开幕：2026年6月6日 周六上午10点

直播导览：2026年6月6日 周六下午3点

 

 

台是什么？是中国人家里的阳台、灶台、窗台，是村口的戏台，是茶桌上的茶台，是庙前的拜台。台不大，刚好够一个人站上去、坐下来或者跪下来。台没有屋顶，但它是普通人“修行”的必经之地——你不需要进山，不需要剃度，只需要在自家的台前发一会儿呆、喝一杯茶、点一根烟，那一刻，世界就远了一米。

 

荣格说，人需要一块“Temenos”（神圣领域），才能完成自足。他在自己房子的拱门上刻了一行拉丁文：“无论是否被召唤，神都会在场”——那其实就是他的台。而中国人早就有更朴素的说法：灵台。不是宗教的祭坛，而是每个人心里那一小块清明的、自己说了算的地方。

 

耿大有把不锈钢、羊毛、实木并置在一起，于是，最坚硬的金属和最柔软的纤维相触。材料不是中性的媒介：冷与暖、硬与软、重与轻，这些物质关系直接作用于身体感知，触碰到的是人作为肉身最原初的物质直觉——那种自然唯物的世界观。他的作品本身就是一座座台，让人的身体停下来，重新辨认自身的重量与温度。

 

耿大有把这座“台”搬进了井陉的百年教堂。教堂建于1931年，砖石垒成，承重柱是圆的。观众看展览时要绕着柱子走——圆形的柱子，作品围绕着柱子也是圆的，这不只是巧合。绕柱而行的观众不是被动的观看者：每一次转向，都是一次微小的偏离。耿大有将这种偏离追溯到卢克莱修笔下原子的偶然偏斜（clinamen）——因果链条上的微小断裂，恰恰是自由和意义诞生的地方。

 

6月6日——卡尔·古斯塔夫·荣格的祭日。一座乡村教堂，一圈绕柱而行的观众，一些等待辨认的数字。台从来不在远处，它就在最日常的地方，等着人站上去，踩着脚下那一小块坚实的地面。但耿大有说：“再不可动摇的地基，都诞生于偶然性的秩序。”

 

“而我们正生活在奇迹之下。”

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Publications

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Hunsand Space: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fqhG4elGB3OILxzmMBGEcQ