As language gradually loses its efficacy, misreadings proliferate, and communicative boundaries blur, how do we still manage to “be understood”? In the face of cultural dislocation, migration, the erosion of native tongues, and the fragmentary expression shaped by social media, language no longer functions as a universal bridge—on the contrary, it becomes a barrier. This exhibition turns instead toward non-verbal forms of artistic expression: image, rhythm, ritual, structure, material, the body, silence—pathways that “speak volumes” without depending on language.

After Language brings together artists whose works are situated within this post-linguistic framework. They challenge the dominance of language in narration and embrace the ambiguity, emotionality, and openness inherent in non-verbal expression. The exhibition is particularly attuned to works that explore “the absence of language,” “untranslatable experience,” and “the power of silence.” Art here is not only a method of creation, but a renewed inquiry into what it means to understand.




“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein



After Language, June 29th- July 11th, 2025, Underline Art Space Gallery, London

Art Opening: June 29th, 5pm-9pm

Producer: Didots Curator:Sen Kwok Curatorial execution: Hao Meng Co-curatorial Team: UnderlineArtSpace



Participating Artists: Lanyun Huang, Yichun Huang, Xiaoran Fan, Anais Ost, Annabel Cator, Keiying Yip, Ziyi wang & Siyuan Shen




At the exhibition’s opening, artist Lanyun Huang performed her work am,t,s,me. In this piece, her body no longer acts as a vessel for language, but becomes a witness to the system of language itself. The performance begins with her body embedded in a bathroom, a private yet highly structured space. Hidden within the repetition of daily gestures are discipline and submission; systems become internalized through bodily routine. Rather than imitating bathroom objects, the artist integrates herself into its system, allowing subjective will to dissolve as language collapses into unconsciousness seeping through bodily fissures.

Later in the performance, she moves from the bathroom back into the public gallery space. Language degrades, from a tool of speech to lingering noise, from semantic logic to passive bodily traces. When her body is covered by objects and emotions unravel, she becomes an echo of lingering social structures: beyond language, how does the body become a shadow of order, a residue of voice, a ghost of structure?





In AnaisAnais’s installation works, material becomes both site and sound. Her sculptural language draws upon geological eras, erosion, and mirrored distortions. In her works, the pedestal is no longer a support structure but a container of sediment, memory, and emotion. Reflective surfaces do not restore identity but fracture it. Anais builds a non-verbal grammar through texture, collapse, and reflection—a poetics of material tension and quiet resistance. In the absence of narrative, her work speaks through glint, trace, and weight.






Artist Xiaoren Fan offers a material narrative that transcends the linguistic system. Working with the elemental forces of fire and earth, he constructs installations that simulate a sensory and transformational logic independent of words. His two works in the exhibition explore how woven materials can create a “perceptual ritual” beyond text. Here, language is replaced by a system of symbols, light, material density, and tactile rhythm. In a post-human context, his sculptural forms evolve like proto-organisms, resisting the human-centric dominance of meaning. Viewers do not understand through reading but instead receive meaning passively through resonance with the material.






Yichun Huang presents four paintings in the exhibition. Her practice embodies a deliberate detour around linguistic structure and a reconstruction of visual grammar. By rejecting preordained composition, she generates pictorial order through subconscious flow. Vivid colors and interwoven geometries form fragmented yet coherent spatial slices. Her painting approaches a ritual act of image-making—one that activates internal perception and rebinds subject and world in a non-verbal state. These works are neither narrative nor expressive, but instead interrogate the limits of perception through visual form.







In the curatorial context of After Language, Annabel Cator’s installation A torso, a thing, a flower. seems to propose a simultaneous deconstruction of linguistic structure and bodily boundaries. Drawing on queer ecology, she places “the body” within a cyclical dynamic of decay and regeneration, constructing a generative space beyond language—where the concept of “I” is undone and the binary of subject/object fails. Through biological materials and installation, she fabricates a material relic that hovers between human and non-human, transforming post-linguistic expression into a field of organic mutation, structural sedimentation, and species entanglement. This is not merely an avoidance of language, but the construction of a post-linguistic ethics: dismantling linguistic hegemony with the body, suggesting rebirth through decay, and generating power through silence.






The artist duo Ziyi Wang & Siyuan Shen, with a background in textile design, explore domains “beyond mechanisms of expression.” Their works begin with parametric modeling and 3D printing, then integrate hand-weaving and dyeing to forge a material language that emerges from—and exceeds—digital logic. Here, the digital becomes not just a tool but a tactile grammar. Their work finds tension in the gaps between virtual and real, logic and chance, automation and craft: it reflects the cool order of data structures while introducing uncertainty and bodily presence through materiality. This dialectical visual language suggests that when language withdraws, expression may shift toward the material edges—into the tension of structure, and the distribution of form.





Lastly, Keiying Yip’s work poses a pivotal question: when language fails, how is the sacred still perceived and sustained? Through the reconstruction of Buddhist symbols and ritual artifacts, she liberates belief from linguistic narration, turning instead to a system of material, sensory, and vital resonance. Her works do not “speak” but “manifest”—evoking silent empathy between the sensing subject and non-human life. She reminds us that faith, identity, and being are not bound to language, but continuously emerge and transform within the non-verbal.




In sum, this exhibition gathers artistic expressions that transcend, bypass, or break down in the face of language. Together, these seven groups of artists from diverse cultural backgrounds construct a cross-media field of non-verbal experimentation. Through their explorations in vision, material, and para-linguistic form, they compose a world after language—one that speaks not through words or assertions, but through experience, sensation, and a resonance that remains open, unresolved, and deeply felt.




About curator





Sen Kwok is a curator and cross-media artist, currently based between London and Guangzhou. He holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, UK, and is the founder of UnderlineArtSpace. Over the years, he has curated nearly a hundred art projects across the globe, with exhibitions presented in cities such as New York, London, Milan, Gwangju, Beijing, and Shanghai.

Sen approaches curating as a practice of meaning-making. His practices often center on cross-cultural curatorial approaches that explore resonance, dissonance, and tensions between cultures. He is particularly engaged in socially driven and critical curating, with research interests that span ethnic identity, human-nature relationships, collective memory, community-based art, and gender-related issues.




Selected Featured Artists & Works


Keiying Yip




Keiying Yip’s practice delves into the shared emotions of sacredness, suffering, and transcendence within the framework of Buddhist philosophy. Through her understanding of cultural looting and religious revolutions, Yip examines how the meanings of objects are reshaped by external forces. Her practice touches on the fluid nature of identity, power, and cultural exchange, revealing how objects once deemed sacred undergo transformation over time, reflect on the authoritative significance these symbols held in different eras, while also acknowledging the enduring essence of their spiritual purposes. Yip also draws connections between the grotesque sensation of being animals. She constructs a fantastical realm where animals, plants, and humankind merge together in search for peace, within our existence and the illusion of ‘self’. By using digital technology to mold organism-like creatures, adapting certain sacredness by applying heavy material such as steel and brass. Her practice evokes the interconnectedness of all beings, exploring the contrast between freedom and the price of freedom. Ultimately deconstruct the ecological hierarchy of human domination, through observation on suffering and necessity of human belief and existence.



Yichun Huang




Yichun Huang, a multi-media artist based in London, blends her background in oil painting with abstract and digital techniques. Her work delves into the unseen world, exploring themes of philosophy, religion, and universal laws.



Lanyun Huang




Lanyun Huang (Finch) is a London-based queer artist and researcher working across live art and curation. Taking multiple persona, she creates conceptually driven, often durational performances in everyday or disruptive settings (as Lanyun), and theatrical works rooted in queer nightlife, collective energy, and folk culture (as Finch). Her practice engages with queer identity, taboo, improvisation, and the shifting dynamics between performer and audience, grounded in a critical reflection on social structures and the politics of visibility.


Xiaoran Fan




Xiaoran Fan (b. Sichuan, China) is a London-based sculptor. He holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, a BA from Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, and also studied at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts in Italy.

Fan’s work is deeply informed by mystical thought and draws inspiration from alchemical traditions in both concept and technique. He works with organic, inorganic, and biological materials to create hybrid sculptural forms. Employing processes such as corrosion, fusion, and sublimation—often echoing alchemical procedures—he explores the vitality and symbolism inherent in material transformation. His installations reflect on issues of identity, species boundaries, and posthuman existence, often evoking ritual and serving as philosophical interfaces between the material and the spiritual, the natural and the artificial.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including in China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Italy, demonstrating a distinct global perspective.



Annabel Cator




Annabel occupies space using the body as a site of resistance, abstraction and becoming. Exploring nonverbal communication and material ecology. She is currently completing her MFA at Central Saint Martins where she is deepening her research with biomaterials and regenerative practices. Her approach to biomateriality informs how she will occupy space through both performance and installation. She uses performance, installation, sculptural work to navigate what it means to activate agency and to dissolve binaries, decolonising thought by embracing queer ecologies. Her evolving practice finds roots in posthumanism, queer ecology, and quantum mechanics.


Ziyi Wang & Siyuan Shen





Ziyi Wang and Siyuan Shen are multidisciplinary designers and fiber artists who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2023. Originally from China and currently based in London, they both have strong academic backgrounds in product and textile design. Through collaboration, they explore the complex relationship between the digital and the material. Their practice goes beyond simple disciplinary fusion, delving into the nuanced interactions and dialectical tensions between digital technologies and traditional craftsmanship.



Anais Ost




Anais’s work highlights the tensions between solidity and fluidity, the organic and the industrial, stillness and motion, encouraging a deeper awareness of the liminal, ever-shifting landscapes we navigate, both literally and conceptually. My practice explores light, sound, texture, time, and materiality through sculpture and installation, investigating the interplay between human experience and our relationship with nature. Influenced by my background in music and a passion for geography, I strive to transcend the object, creating works that engage with space and invite viewers to do the same. Each encounter is unique, shaped by movement, perspective, and interaction with the surroundings. I am interested in how we inhabit and relate to our environments and identities, learning from the passage of time and the transformations found in nature. Increasingly, I ask how we might build forms that can hold what flows, vessels for movement, memory, and elemental force, while embracing impermanence. By integrating natural and manmade materials with technology, I blur the perceived boundaries between self and environment, immersing viewers in experiences that reflect on change, erosion, and interconnectedness.





Produced by Didots