Yuri Boyko’s artistic practice, through the orchestration of light, color, symbolic imagery, and spatial relationships, continually asks: how does the individual come to form a sense of self within memory, culture, environment, and time, and how might that self gradually move beyond its own limitations through the acts of seeing and creating?
This exhibition takes the Chinese concept of Tiān Rén Hé Yī—the unity of Heaven and humanity—as its philosophical thread, and uses the relationship between the “small self” and the “great Self” as its path of development, offering a renewed entry into Boyko’s creative world. Within this framework, the individual is not understood as an isolated or enclosed being, but as one that remains in profound relation with Heaven, Earth, and all things. In this sense, self-realization is not merely the completion of an autonomous and whole “I,” but a gradual movement, through reflection, cultivation, and perception, from the small self toward the great Self, and from personal experience toward a broader cosmic order.
What the exhibition seeks to present is precisely such a deeper spiritual process: how the artist transforms inner experience into image through the act of creation, and how the image in turn becomes a medium connecting the self and the world, the individual and the universe. Here, art is not merely a means of representation, but also a way of approaching the Dao—a practice through which the subject, by means of seeing, sensing, and creating, re-establishes its relationship with all things.
The structure of the small self and the great Self also provides the exhibition with its spatial logic. The former points to memory, emotion, identity, and the psychological dimensions of individual experience; the latter points to a greater mode of being beyond the singular subject, an integrated experience in which humanity resonates with Heaven and Earth, the city, history, and all things. These two are not separate from one another, but together, through movement, transformation, and mutual reflection, constitute the spiritual dimension of the artist’s work.
Through this perspective, we hope that as viewers enter the exhibition, they will not only see the images themselves, but also perceive the path behind them—a path that leads from the self toward the world; not only encounter the complexity of individual existence, but also sense the place and resonance of the human being within a greater order.
