By: Kalinca Costa Söderlund
Puyi Deng’s curatorial project Entre Deux at Galerie St-Guillaume in Paris (21-26 September 2026), rests on the premise that art is not the product of a specific time or individual creator, but the result of broader relational and non-teleological frameworks: a symphony bringing together past and present, artworks, their materiality and formal specificity, galleries as interactive spatial-temporal domains, and audiences as responsive elements and contributors to the generation of meaning. Art cannot exist without a symbiosis among all these elements, as without their interaction it would fail to generate new ways of seeing and understanding the world.
Attention is also paid to conventions applied to craft-world and art-world formations, aiming at exploring the tensions between these two worlds whilst simultaneously blurring them. Danièle Boisot-Daguier, one of the two artists that Deng selected for the show, trained with a master glassmaker and therefore developed her practice inside a traditional craftsmanship sphere governed by its own internal technical standards, despite her discursive fluency in art history. Deng’s choice of Boisot-Daguier’s pieces for Entre Deux reflects the pursuit of the perceptual possibilities that emerge at the threshold between the refinement of craft and conceptual departure from it. The telling detail here is that Boisot-Daguier’s command of the medium, resulting in an exquisite overlap of chromatic possibilities, relief, and light reflection, is displayed as framed canvases or prints. Presenting Boisot-Daguier’s works as wall-based contemplation makes a boundary-crossing gesture and operates as a conversational device between fine art and craftsmanship.
ML H Zero’s Whisper From The Still (2023) extends the exhibition’s phenomenological register into installation, situating the quiet, absorptive closeness with the viewer that Deng’s curatorial perspective establishes around Boisot-Daguier’s glasswork. Like Boisot-Daguier’s pieces, Zero’s cloths belong to a domain of crafts where translucency and partial visibility convey that, if images could potentially be converted into words, they would evoke creatures whispering, like wind, the fragility of the environment and humanity. By contrast, Zero’s Romance Floating in Realism (2021) belongs to a lineage shaped by 1960s-70s conceptualism and Fluxus in video art, and therefore has no artisanal guild history to escape. This work is fully naturalised contemporary art that holds no pretence in terms of displaying manual virtuosity, operating comfortably within current art-world conventions.
This shows Deng’s boldness in juxtaposing materially substantial yet transparent glass practices and dematerialised, technology-based ones. She is fearlessly stating that media that define the spirit of modernity and contemporaneity and belong to two differing value systems can perfectly coexist in the same ‘white cube’ and be appreciated by an audience which judges them by the same discursive frame. The juxtaposition establishes a clear relationship between glass as ‘another way of seeing’ and video art as ‘words hidden behind its appearance’. After all, seeing through a glass surface means reaching conceptual and discursive content as the material turns into art, just as the visible/audiovisual content of a video can lead metaphorically to a transparent, lustrous, and visually dense perceptual experience.
