Becoming while failing
From November 22 to December 7, 2025, Fishead Lab presented its first art exhibition: Becoming While Failing.
“Fishead” is an untitled neologism—imagined, non-serious, and carrying a playful nuance. It exists between collage, fracture, and deformation, simultaneously belonging to the body and floating beyond it. Accordingly, Fishead Lab is not a pristine exhibition space; it allows for disorder and chaos, encouraging primary perception and emotion to emerge within disruption.
Within this context, the exhibition Becoming While Failing unfolds. It constructs a continually occurring field, reflecting the state of contemporary individuals navigating systemic structures.
The exhibition transforms the white-cube space with plastic sheeting, returning it to a state of incompletion. The gallery is conceived s a site still under construction, continuously unfolding, where the neutral guise of the white cube is deconstructed, revealing the limitations of exhibitionary and institutional systems, while inviting visitors to actively participate in the process of meaning-making.
Each work within the exhibition embodies a cycle of becoming and failing: some emphasize the force of emergence, others merge emergence with failure, while others generate significance precisely through moments of failure. The interplay between the space as a destabilized system and the works’ state of suspension forms the core tension of the exhibition, allowing audiences to perceive the co-existence of vitality, emotion, and the constraints of institutional systems.
Artists & Works
Xizi Du
Born in 1997 in Inner Mongolia, China.
In 2016, Xizi Du completed undergraduate studies in Visual Communication at Jiujiang University. In 2021, he continued his studies at La Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, specializing in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies.
Her artistic practice often starts from humor, using calm reflection to enhance viewers’ skepticism and reveal or subvert their spatial perception of trust.
Untitled (2022–2025)
This work collects everyday packaging, tickets, and ordinary materials for reinterpretation through graffiti. By altering mundane objects, the artist creates a playful, humorous visual language, encouraging viewers to reconsider daily experience and consumer habits. The work transforms ordinary materials into an extension of daily life, allowing participation in the creationof rules and meaning.
Breathing Diary(2021)
Materials: Epoxy resin, clay
This piece records the artist’s breathing during the aftermath of an intimate relationship. Each exhale is preserved in resin, constructing a living personal archive. The work materializes personal emotion and bodily experience, creating a rhythm that embodies recovery and emotional progress. Breathing becomes a new language, a way for the body to convey mood and spirit—a visualization of the inner self, a method of self-healing through physical engagement with emotional reality.
Mo Wanling
Born in 1999, based in Milan and Guangzhou.
Mo’s practice explores bodily perception and mental spaces through performance, painting, and spatial installation. Using nature as a medium, she constructs immersive fields that resonate with the viewer. Her work probes the gray areas of human consciousness—dreams, sleep, sensory drift, and the boundaries of the mind—responding poetically and spontaneously to the tension between inner and outer states.
Her paintings reflect internal psychological space, with color serving as an emotional carrier. Forests, water, and land become metaphors for blurred boundaries, constantly transforming on the canvas to reveal the subtle tension between order and freedom. Her work evokes elusive memories, unexpressed feelings, or overlooked logic.
Tan Di
Born in 1997 in Shandong, China.
Undergraduate at London College of Communication; currently a graduate student at La Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan.
Tan draws inspiration from Milanese daily life: street graffiti, flickering subway ads, fleeting gestures of passersby, and traces left in urban cracks—all forming entry points for observation and reflection.
Cheng Sanshan
Born in 2000
Currently pursuing a Master’s in Sculpture at Brera Academy, Milan. She studied at Luxun Academy of Fine Arts. Her practice explores the interaction of nature, space, body, objects, and environment. Her style balances minimalism and symbolism, using materiality to create poetic, reflective spaces that invite dialogue between the natural and internal worlds.
