The Absent Self: Imagining the Soul Through Contemporary Portraiture, Four Artists, Four Cultures, One Elusive Presence

Text by Curator Metra Lin

In a world where our identities are constantly filtered, quantified, and performed, can portraiture still help us search for the “real self”?
The Absent Self brings together four artists from different cultural backgrounds—Cen Long (China), Yasuko Hayashi (Japan), Beatriz (Spain), and Matteo (Italy)—who aren’t interested in replicating faces or identities. Instead, they explore the in-between: the blurred, shifting, and often unspoken states of being.

Each artist uses their own visual language to ask: what does a soul look like—and can it even be seen? Drawing from Eastern metaphysics, poetic reflections on womanhood, existentialism, and symbolic imagery, these works don’t capture appearance. They evoke something inner, changing, nameless—but undeniably present.

This show doesn’t aim to reconstruct a stable image of the self. Rather, it invites you to ask: can art stir something real inside us? Perhaps it’s in the space of absence where the soul quietly begins to reveal itself.

Cen Long — The Soul Whispers Through Stillness

In Cen Long’s portraits, we come face to face with a deeper kind of presence—one that hovers between stillness and suspension. His simplified forms, subdued colors, and quiet compositions create a space where emotion and spirit hum just beneath the surface.

Rooted in both Eastern and Western philosophies, his work is inspired by ideas like “egolessness,” asceticism, and the purity found through suffering. These are not portraits of ego, but echoes of a self refined through time and faith—sacred, silent, and soul-deep.

Yasuko Hayashi — Sensing the Inner Self Through Silence

Yasuko Hayashi’s work is quiet, but not empty. Her portraits are layered with soft textures and fine Japanese mineral pigments, creating an almost weightless quality that feels both transparent and infinite.

She doesn't depict faces—we see fleeting states of mind. Her art taps into the Japanese concept of yūgen—the beauty of the unseen, the hinted, the felt. Her portraits drift in and out of form, like echoes of memory or quiet reflections of nature, inviting us to sense rather than see.

Beatriz — Remembering the Self Through Dream and Symbol

Beatriz doesn’t paint to identify people—she paints the subconscious. In her works, flowers bloom from hair, pages turn into wings, tears fall like rivers. These are dreamscapes, filled with symbols and psychological metaphors.

Blending classical painting with contemporary inner narratives, her portraits feel familiar yet strange. The figures seem speechless, holding stories they can’t say out loud. Beatriz’s work turns the portrait inward—it’s not about what’s on the surface, but the buried emotions and forgotten memories that rise quietly to meet us.

Matteo — Tracing the Cracks in the Self

Matteo’s portraits are never stable. Faces blur, expressions twist, outlines melt into chaos. His works feel like emotional snapshots taken at the moment the self is unraveling.

He paints not to capture, but to question. Influenced by existentialism, psychoanalysis, and contemporary expression, his distorted figures reflect anxiety, solitude, and identity in flux. His raw brushstrokes and fractured compositions pull us to the edge—asking not “Who is this?” but “Where am I broken too?”

Final Thought

This exhibition isn’t about showing faces. It’s about hearing the echo of something deeper. Can we still meet the self—hidden, silenced, but never truly gone—through a painting? In these works, the “absent self” hasn’t vanished. It’s waiting. For a still moment. A quiet gaze. A memory we didn’t know we had.