TRACERIES
Category: Art Exhibition
Location: 1221 Yan'an West Road, Changning, Shanghai
Size: 250sqm
Year: 2026
We live in a frictionless era: glass screens leave no mark, and digital systems preserve everything except the feeling of being there. Traceries responds to this smoothness by returning attention to what resists perfect copying—light that can only be witnessed in real time, matter that records decay, and cities that archive collective presence through countless footsteps.
Curated and organized by Atelier INDJ, Traceries brings together artists working at the intersection of kinetic installation, analog photography, material transformation, and urban documentation. Across the exhibition, each work functions as a recording device—capturing not only an image, but the conditions of light & time and the cost of attention required to make something endure.
The Fleeting Light
At the energetic core of the exhibition is HALO XL, a kinetic installation by Ian Douglas-Jones. A motorized armature inscribes invisible double-helix patterns into the air—present only while witnessed, and gone the moment the motion ceases. HALO XL offers a meditative counterpoint, a luminous monument to what cannot be screenshotted, shared, or stored without losing its essential ephemeral character.
Ian Douglas-Jones, HALO XL (2025). Kinetic installation.
In dialogue with this ephemerality, ANALOG PAST (HALO XL) by Ian Douglas-Jones & Anthony Reed translates HALO XL’s motion into long-exposure medium-format film photographs. Over minutes of darkness, photons accumulate on silver-halide film, producing images with grain, imperfections, and a physical aura that cannot be duplicated without loss. Together, installation and photographs propose a productive tension: vanishing versus endurance, immediate experience versus chemical capture.
Ian Douglas-Jones & Anthony Reed, ANALOG PAST (HALO XL). Film photography.
A parallel archive, HALO XL - DIGITAL PAST (2025), documents the same kinetic patterns through contemporary digital long exposure. Rather than presenting digital as superior or inferior, Traceries positions it as another mode of witnessing—precise, repeatable, and easily reproduced—raising questions about how documentation technologies shape what we consider “real.”
Ian Douglas-Jones, HALO XL - DIGITAL PAST (2025) . Digital long-exposure photography.
Perception as Inner Friction
Vasily Betin’s PHANEROSCOPY begins with a premise: perception is not a window, but a computed process. By constructing custom optical devices and 3D-printed cameras, Betin deliberately reintroduces friction—restricting light, distorting focus, and producing images that feel like “sediment” rather than snapshots. The work reframes photography as entanglement: artist, machine, and environment physically collide during the duration of exposure.
Vasily Betin, PHANEROSCOPY (2022–ongoing). 3D-printed cameras, lenses, film.
Betin’s NOW timepieces extend this inquiry inward. These are not smart devices designed to optimize productivity, but philosophical instruments—each proposing a distinct lens on time (mortality, recursion, balance, entanglement). Within Traceries, NOW functions as an “internal trace,” mapping the friction of the mind rather than the surface of the city.
Vasily Betin, NOW (2024–ongoing). Custom electronic watches with e-ink display and bespoke programming.
Material Memory and the City as Archive
If light leaves traces through exposure, matter records time through transformation. Alex Damboianu’s ORTHODOX ICONS arise from weathered industrial remnants and organic decay—rust, burned paint, concrete, mold—layered and eroded into forms that echo fragility and tenacity. Informed by Romania’s post-industrial landscape, the works confront time’s slow violence and material’s stubborn refusal to be preserved.
Alex Damboianu, ORTHODOX ICONS (2023–2024). Rust, black lacquer, cotton canvas.
Shanghai’s urban transformation appears through multiple registers in the exhibition. Anthony Reed’s CONCRETE REFLECTIONS uses medium-format film to arrest moments of architectural stillness—an intentional counterpoint to the city’s accelerating demolition and renewal. Concrete becomes both presence and erasure, rendered with the gravity of analog time.
Anthony Reed, CONCRETE REFLECTIONS (2024). Medium-format film photography, archival-quality prints.
In A HAPPY ARRANGEMENT, Anthony & Phillip Reed document abandoned objects across demolition sites—material remnants stripped of commercial value yet given unexpected dignity through the lens. The series treats rubble as evidence, insisting that what is discarded still demands witness and still imprints itself onto collective memory.
Anthony & Phillip Reed, A HAPPY ARRANGEMENT (2024). Digital photography, framed archival-quality prints.
Lu Xinjian contributes two distinct approaches to reading the city. In City DNA / Shanghai No. 20 (1–4), he translates urban morphology into hand-painted acrylic grids, reintroducing human trace into systemic logic through brushwork and sustained labor. In Matrix, the aerial logic of cities becomes a minimalist codification—yet still anchored in material presence, resisting the immateriality implied by its digital namesake.
Lu Xinjian, City DNA / Shanghai No. 20 (1–4) (2025). Acrylic on canvas.
Lu Xinjian, Matrix: 2002 TYAN_TIGER_MPX_(S2466)F_S2024 (2024). Laser-engraved plexiglass and LED lights.
The Artists
Traceries is presented by six creatives with “hidden identities.” They work daily as architects, programmers, photographers, interaction designers, DJs, new-media artists, and painters. In this cross-disciplinary experiment, they translate the retrospections of their fields into art.
It is also the artist debut of Atelier INDJ’s founder Ian Douglas-Jones apart from his designer identity
Artists of TRACERIES from left to right, up to down: Ian Douglas-Jones; Alex Damboianu; Anthony Reed & Phillip Reed; Lu Xinjian; Vasily Betin.
Special Section: Art in Commerce
A dedicated section, Art in Commerce, presents a curated selection of site-specific projects demonstrating how art installations can inject cultural value and sensory depth into commercial environments—transforming transactional spaces into destinations of experience and memory. In an era where retail competes with digital convenience, these interventions argue that physical space remains relevant when it offers what screens cannot: embodied wonder, spatial poetry, and encounters that demand presence.
Exhibition Date & Location
VIP & Press Preview: 5th-6th, March, 2026
Public Days: 7th- 25th, March, 2026.
Opening Hours: Mon 12:30- 20:00, Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00
Guided Tours: Tue-Thu, 11:00 & 14:00, 30mins/session. (Reserve via the QR code on the poster)
Press kit are available upon request via info@i-n-d-j.com
欢迎索要媒体包，可写邮件至info@i-n-d-j.com
