Hua International Beijing/Berlin

Hua International presents Italian born Swiss artist Alfredo Aceto in dialogue with Chinese artist Shi Yi. Engaging Craig Owens’s notion of allegory, both examine signifiers of masculinity and local cultural codes. Aceto’s Tongue Twister shows fragments of the masculine body, while Bocca con Matita places a pencil in parted lips, replacing speech with writing. Shi Yi merges Chaozhou painting traditions with Western motifs and is presented to a European audience for the first time.

Alfredo Aceto (b. 1991, Turin) lives and works in Geneva. He studied Fine Arts at ECAL in Lausanne. Working across film, installation, sculpture and sound, his practice explores the body, biography and the manipulation of time through environments suspended between fiction and reality. His work has been shown at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, MAMCO and Fondazione Merz.

Shi Yi (b. 1993, Guangdong) lives and works in Beijing. He received a BA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (2017) and an MFA from Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (2021). His paintings draw on religion, folklore and mass media, depicting emotionally charged moments and bodily gestures that reveal psychological states and the social structures underlying them.