In the Heat of the Era

WU SPACE is honored to announce 'In The Heat Of The Era' the first major solo exhibition in China by Singaporean artist Kent Chan. The exhibition dutation is deliberately set during Shenyang's sharp seasonal transition, as the city shifts from the residual cold of the North into the humid heat of mid-summer. Featuring eleven significant works created since 2020, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a complex narrative field where thermodynamics, geoengineering, and cultural imagination intertwine. In his practice, Chan profoundly deconstructs the 'tropics', liberating the term from traditional geographical definitions and reimagining it as a global thermodynamic state that is actively reshaping social orders and institutional memories.

Spanning five acts across the ground floor and subterranean level, the exhibition builds a 'thermal arc' shaped by the interplay of light, humidity and temporature. In 'The Casting Heat', the audience witnesses how climate shifts from an unpredictable phenomenon into a technical product that can be precisely casted into reality. Through the macro-perspective of 'Weather Casting', heat is revealed as a tool of geoengineering; meanwhile, 'Idols Idle' employs a playful yet stark visual language, encasing ancient ceramic deities of nature within neon-lit computer chassis humming with cooling fans. Here, heat is both the primal energy driving the machine and an aggressive force translating sacred nature into controllable parameters.

As the path extends into the vast physical field of the basement, heat sheds its unidirectional projection to become a horizontal connective matter. Eight mirrors-tilted like solar panels capture the flow of skylight while fragmenting the viewers' bodies into this 'solar field'. Within the radical electronic soundwaves of 'Warm Fronts', the social pulses of diverse tropical regions are synchronized to a single frequency. Heat is no longer a localized temperature variance but a wave-like fluctuation that bypasses geographical barriers, acting as an invisible front that weaves scattered historical experiences into a shared audiovisual resonance.

Passing through the yellow PVC curtain, the audience enters a rehearsal of a future 'Global Tropics' in 'The Speculative Heat'. This is a 'perpetual summer society' where winter has ceased to exist. With the initial introduction of mist, the air becomes humid and viscous. In the imagined world of 'Future Tropics' and 'Solar Orders', heat emerges as a new political code. As seasonal fluctuations are replaced by constant radiation, traditional social contracts and geographical borders soften and dissolve. Heat becomes an absolute sovereignty, reshaping the rhythms of human existence and the maps of power.

At the peak of the 'thermal arc', 'The Narrative Heat', heat shifts from visual metaphor into oppressive physical friction. Within the high-saturation, high-humidity environment of 'Monsoons', heat becomes a medium of resistance against frozen memories. Through the anthropomorphic confessions of museum artifacts in 'Tell-tale', and a critique of the 'cold and dry' climatic standards of Western museological traditions, the exhibition exposes the tension between tropical artifacts and cold archival systems. Here, heat acts as a solvent, attempting to melt the time frozen by colonial history, allowing historical memories imprisoned in cold storage to breathe in the humid air.

The arc concludes with a turn toward micro-narratives of individual body heat. As the exhibition's epilogue, 'The Lingering Heat' uses five time-spanning film fragments— ranging from the Vietnam War to Malay mythology-to explore how humans carry 'heat' with them through migration.

In this final act, heat strips away its grand shell of geopolitics and returns to a lingering warmth latent in language, belief, and blood. It is a memory carrier that does not extinguish as life flows, marking the final closure of this thermal journey within the emotional resonance of the individual.

In the heat of the era, it changes our breath, it becomes us.

About the artist

Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context.

He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. His works have taken the form of moving-image, text, performances, and exhibitions.