Four Boxes Gallery presents Loach Water by Zishi Han and Wei Yang. A loach is a small, clear-eyed, black-beaded fish common in China – slippery, playful, and solitary by nature. It is a bottom-dweller of muddy pond waters. Across their floors, the exhibition invites us into a quiet yet multilayered universe, where homoerotic tales from the Ming dynasty meet a European present, hovering somewhere between autobiography, fiction, myth, and reality. Drawing on the more than 400-year-old Chinese anthology Biàn ér chāi (Hairpin Beneath), which explores love, gender, and desire, Han and Yang reinterpret the novel Qingzhen ji (A Story of Faithful Love), in which an academician falls in love with a younger student.

The Ming dynasty anthology offers a rare and poetic glimpse into the era’s narratives of homoerotic relationships. First published under the pseudonym The Moon-Heart Master of the Drunken West Lake, it is said to have been banned during the Qing dynasty. Loach Water is a personal and artistic journey that moves between fiction and biography, history and the present. Han and Yang explore how power and desire are shaped by time and culture across shifting boundaries. At a moment when LGBTQ+ rights are being rolled back around the world, the artists connect historical narratives with their own lived experiences as queer artists and members of the Chinese diaspora in Europe.

Through video, performance, and sculpture, they examine the relationships between closeness and estrangement, presence and absence, power and intimacy. On their own terms, with clear eyes, they navigate the muddy currents of past and present.

Loach Water is part of the exhibition series unboxing, curated by Rebekka Laugesen. The exhibition was first presented at Politikens Forhal in 2025 in collaboration Charlottenborg Fonden and co-curated by Klara Li, Director of Charlottenborg Fonden. The work Hairpin Beneath: The Stone of Three Lives was commissioned by SculptureCenter, New York, in 2025.