UP Gallery is pleased to present A Conversation Between Ashes and a Pebble in spring 2026, marking the gallery’s first solo exhibition in collaboration with artist Jess Lau. Working primarily with video, animation, and installation, Lau’s practice examines fractured narratives, embodied memory, and the slow progression of time through repetitive actions. Through layered, hands-on processes, her works allow fiction and reality to permeate one another, leaving traces of the body and emotion through accumulation and erosion.

The exhibition centers on Lau’s ongoing development of what she refers to as “cave-wall animation,” unfolding around the themes of body, action, and trace. The Cave with a Wheeze is a site-fixed stop-motion animation generated on a 2 × 3 meter white wall. Using charcoal, the artist draws, frame by frame, small blackened figures moving from the edges of the wall toward its center. Each drawn mark is subsequently erased; each act of erasure leaves behind new residue. Through this repeated cycle, the wall gradually fills with the afterimages of walking, accumulating the weight of time embedded in labor itself.

Once the wall is filled, the artist intervenes directly with her body—using fingertips, palms, and knuckles to slowly wipe away the charcoal dust, attempting to return the surface to its original state. A clock quietly appears within the frame, marking the temporal tension between lived time and image time. This near-obsessive repetition renders the body a central apparatus through which images are both produced and dissolved.

The exhibition also premieres a newly created walking video work. Moving along the rocky coastline of Qixingtan Beach, the artist treats walking as a form of writing: with each step taken, her gaze settles on the stone beneath her feet. As the camera advances with her movement, images emerge and disappear frame by frame, like breathing. Walking here is no longer mere movement, but a means of compressing time into the body; each step is an irreversible moment.

Between charcoal dust and wall surfaces, footsteps and landscape, A Conversation Between Ashes and a Pebble unfolds as a quiet yet sustained dialogue. Rather than constructing a grand narrative, the works allow repetitive labor and subtle gestures to serve as evidence of time itself, positioning the body as both the origin of the image and the site of its eventual dissipation.