Panpan

Small Gallery's exhibition, Visit Me Not, opened on 11 November 2025— Singles’ Day—and ran until 12 December.

 

At the centre of the exhibition room stands only a single mimosa pudica, the plant often known as touch-me-not. The shy, sensitive, and tenderly defiant nature of the plant mirrors the exhibition’s own mode of operation. Throughout the exhibition period, every individual who requested an appointment/ticket was rejected. 

​​

This is probably the most introverted exhibition that one can ever imagine. 

 

Visit Me Not was staged consciously as an art historical dialogue. 

1958, Paris, an empty gallery room. Nothing more, nothing less. That was The Void, an exhibition by Yves Klein. Thanks to publicity, three thousand visitors crowded the street and the Iris Clert Gallery. Among them was philosopher Albert Camus, who wrote in the visitors’ book: "With the void, full powers."

​

If Klein’s The Void asked whether an exhibition without artworks would still be an exhibition, Visit Me Not wonders: when there are no visitors at all, does an exhibition still exist?

​

The name list - and reactions - of individuals whose visiting requests were rejected became part of this exhibition.

​

A close exhibition does not prevent human interactions. Among the rejected individuals, there are colleagues and students largely in the field of art and art history, who teased me in a way as if I were a touch-me-not. There is a local mum who wanted to make an appointment to visit the exhibition with her five-year-old son because visiting a gallery was her son’s homework that week. There is a London-and San Francisco based American artist, Rebecca E. Miller, who later held her solo exhibition at Small Gallery . Two individuals requested to be anonymous. 

 

Most booking requests came in through the digital platform Eventbrite. Eventbrite automatically helped me record the time each appointment was made, precise to millisecond. In a way that is not always known to us, digital technologies have radically altered our sense of the scaling of time.

 

​
 

​

​
 

​

​