Can glass become oil? Can flowers laid upon a wounded body turn into blood? Can one wash burning secrets in a pond? Play ping-pong with a mirror racket? Blow soap bubbles into the sun?

With Shuo Hao, painting and poetry hold each other. Huile de vitre (Glass Oil), the title of the exhibition and of the accompanying book, crystallizes this link between image and language: at the border of the visible and the invisible, of word and silence—where intuition precedes meaning, where hope or miracle may appear. Out of these imaginary or seemingly futile gestures, without apparent efficiency, emerge a silent beauty and the possibility of inner repair.

The term comes from an ancient belief evoked by Gaston Bachelard in The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938): glass would contain fire, and oil of glass—or vitriol—would be its essence. Shuo Hao turns this into an alchemical metaphor: an imaginary transmutation, an unreal substance where fluid and solid, matter and spirit, intersect to bring forth what escapes the surface.

Born in China and living in France for several years, Shuo Hao marks with this exhibition a transition towards a transversal approach: paintings, texts, furniture, and found objects form a coherent whole, a space of listening where materials, gestures, and words converse.

Conceived as a rite, the exhibition draws inspiration from the Yi Jing, the founding Taoist text that conceives the world as a fabric in perpetual transformation. Each work corresponds to a trigram, tied to a cosmic force, a season, a cardinal point. The space, designed by Shuo Hao as an energetic map, becomes the support of signs in motion, of a shifting balance between opposites—Yin and Yang, full and empty, elements, directions, cycles. The gaze circulates freely, recomposing narratives from clues scattered within a reimagined domestic universe.

Shuo Hao’s imagination is hybrid and embodied. To her dreams, mourning, and visions, she associates Greek and Christian mythological figures: Persephone abducted, Saint Agatha martyred, Actaeon metamorphosed into a stag, Leda violated by Zeus turned swan, Aphrodite and Adonis, Icarus, Cerberus, the Sphinx. All evoke explosions: those moments of rupture when metamorphosis, sacrifice, or fall erupt. Fire here is latent. It burns in the tension between appearance and effacement. The works become zones of passage—between human and animal, between worlds, between pain and transfiguration.

The narrative, like the image, is never linear. Motifs dissolve and redistribute themselves within the works. What matters is the symbolic charge, the potential for transformation each detail carries. Each piece opens a breach, becomes a threshold where the gaze strays and regenerates, in a ritual without beginning or end. The viewer advances among objects turned into doors toward the invisible or the inner self.

This approach echoes pyroscapulomancy, an ancient divinatory technique in which cracks produced by fire on bones or turtle shells were read as signs. The sinologist Léon Vandermeersch reminds us that Chinese writing was born not to transcribe speech, but to draw divination. Similarly, with Shuo Hao, the object—painted or recomposed—becomes an active trace, a support for intuition. Fire here is metaphorical but active: it modifies, reveals, inscribes signs to be deciphered into the matter.

Her works combine painting with found elements—antique furniture, objects gathered at flea markets. Some date back to the 18th century, others have no value. She cuts them, turns them over, diverts them. A table becomes a pedestal, a drawer becomes an ear.

Her painting operates through sudden emergences. She summons dense forms, legendary creatures, symbolic animals: vases, hourglasses, candles, pomegranates, sphinxes, serpents in ouroboros. Bodies are fragmented, objects inhabited by a muted force. The colors are lunar: milky whites, silvery grays, deep blues, extinguished reds. Orifices, hollows, interstices—shells, ears, half-opened flowers—punctuate the works like passage points toward the invisible. Her technique sometimes evokes the ornamental lines of a trumeau or a 19th-century cameo, or the surrealist painting of Magritte or Leonor Fini.

The assemblage becomes an attempt at repair. Not to restore, but to bring forth. Her aesthetics of reuse plays with memory and transformation. Totems, screens, altars carry both the past and what is to come. She calls herself a shaman, an interpreter. She observes and recomposes, listens and invents fictions in old notebooks. The book Huile de vitre (in Mandarin and English) brings together fifty short texts related to the works—not a catalogue nor a counterpoint, but a source, a parallel layer to the exhibition.

Shuo Hao does not seek to explain. She shapes a place of symbolic care, a chapel without dogma where dislocated forms regain an active power. Matter is probed as in a silent psychoanalysis.

The exhibition is traversed by mourning: the recent death of her best friend. A final work is dedicated to him—a three-panel screen, a symbolic number in Taoism, and a shared birthday date. This gesture completes the rite: Huile de vitre becomes a place of memory, a threshold where the dead accompany the living.

More than a title, Huile de vitre becomes a matrix-image, a poetic substance. The exhibition does not construct a closed world. It lets fissures show through. It advances by slips, exploring what lingers in objects, what circulates in silence. Shuo Hao composes a space where loss becomes presence, where gesture composes a form of self-healing, and where, within the glass, a glimmer persists.