From April 19 to July 13, 2025, X Museum partners with Shanghai Qiantan Taikoo Li to present the group exhibition ‘The Pool by The Pool’ at The Pool by X Museum. Centering on the “pool” as public cultural spaces as the narrative, the exhibition features 13 works by four Chinese and Thai artists across diverse media, including painting, installation, and video. The second-floor area extends the conceptual scope of the pool through a curated reading zone and lounge, echoing the openness and fluidity inherent to public spaces. This approach builds upon X Museum’s 2024 exhibition ‘X Collection 202: Portrait of Man’, which explored aquatic themes, and the spatial discourse of ‘Zhilan: A Glance in Urban Garden’ at The Pool, aiming to map the metaphorical genealogy of the “pool” in contemporary art. X Museum collaborates with Art Focus to launch a pop-up store during the exhibition period. As the exhibition’s core motif, the “pool” serves both as a physical reference to X Museum’s Shanghai venue The Pool and a contemporary reinterpretation of its multilayered cultural symbolism across Eastern and Western art history. From the political sociability of ancient Roman baths to the secular vitality depicted in Japanese ukiyo-e bathhouse scenes, pools have long functioned as microcosms of urban public life, embodying spaces where public and private realms intersect, thereby reflecting or disrupting class contradiction. In the contemporary context, it has been deconstructed by successive generations of artists as a projection of personal emotion and otherness, a symbol of consumer culture and alienation, or transformed into a carrier of abstract symbols. This exhibition interrogates the dynamic interplay between space and emotion: the pool acts as both a stage for collective observation and a repository of individual memory. The collision of formless water and sharply defined geometric lines metaphorizes the perpetual tension between social norms and free will. The artists reinterpret the pool’s symbolic significance through multidisciplinary approaches. Yang-Tsung Fan’s paintings adopt Hockney-esque compositions and emotional undertones, yet subvert Californian utopianism with high-saturation summer hues, framing voyeuristic desire through clinically precise perspectives. Thai artist Kitti Narod’s narrative images crystallize pools as slices of tropical leisure culture, their languid atmospheres engaging in a cross-temporal dialogue with the secular aesthetics of Japanese ukiyo-e’s sentō communal bathhouses. Cometabolism Studio’s semi-transparent installations, constructed from acrylic and metal, mirror urban architectural aesthetics to critique homogenized ideals of beauty and challenge entrenched societal values. Bingqing Dong’s AI-generated multimedia work Moist Theater employs entertainment industry tropes to explore identity resistance against power structures through anti-gaze narratives. Transforming the site into a “pool within a pool”, the exhibition amplifies the dual nature of pools as heterotopias: regulated public spaces that simultaneously serve as temporary sanctuaries. By evoking individuals’ various emotional memories of space, the spatial boundaries between the past and reality are dissolved, and the viewer witnesses the deconstruction of the swimming pool by contemporary art, thus becomes a participant in redefining the “space-individual” relationship, and renegotiating the symbiotic coexistence of self and society in the interplay of reality and illusion.
About The Artists
About The Curators
