The Texture of Time: Between Flesh and Nature

Curators

Raine Li

Artists

Ciel Wang

From April 20 to 22, The Koppel Project hosted The Texture of Time: Between Flesh and Nature, a solo exhibition by artist Ciel Wang, curated by Raine Li.

The show explored time, memory, and materiality, lived experience of time rather than a sequence of measured moments. Through a poetic series of photographs, Ciel juxtaposed the aged skin of her grandparents with natural textures such as tree bark, rippling water, and spider webs.

These visual pairings transformed physical traces of aging into landscapes of shared memory, revealing how time etches itself into both flesh and nature. Her approach resists conventional documentary practices in favour of presenting time as an immersive, continuous flow.

According to curator Raine Li, “Ciel’s camera operates like a philosophical tool, uncovering the tactile multiplicity of time.”

Veins, wrinkles, and organic patterns converge into a visual rhythm that blurs the boundary between human and non-human forms, inviting viewers to experience time through bodily perception rather than chronology.

The opening attracted a diverse audience including artists, philosophers, and filmmakers. Visitors responded emotionally to the exhibition’s framing of age marks as visible testimonies of life and continuity, inviting reflection rather than concealment.

By dissolving the boundaries between portraiture and landscape, The Texture of Time offers a unique visual articulation that time is not something we pass through, but something that passes through us.