11 Contemporary Art Center is pleased to present "The Secret Garden", a group exhibition featuring works by Hugo Capron, Yiwen Hu, Ying Xu, Oleksii Shcherbak, Alessandro Miotti, Tomas Jetela, James Watkins, Xinyi Qin, Celia Lees. This exhibition invites you to a feast for the mind and the eyes. The paintings, photographs, and installations in the exhibition focus on the connection between human itself and environment. Artists utilize unique visual narratives to capture the intangible connections between the inner universe of individuals and the surrounding world, blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination. This exhibition aims to explore the interaction between objective factors and cognitive thoughts, bridging the gap of non-neutral relationships in the subconscious, and contemplating metaphors of human nature and the growth of life force. The exhibition officially opens on August 3, 2024.

In Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden," after a family tragedy, the girl Mary is sent to live at Misselthwaite Manor and unexpectedly discovers a mysterious garden that has been left unkept for ten years. With the help of Deacon, a cheerful farm boy, the withdrawn Mary and his sickly, misbehaving cousin, Colin, set out to transform the derelict garden. The upbringing of Mary and Colin was much like the initial state of the secret garden—neglected and abandoned. Through actively labouring to transform the abandoned garden into a Garden of Eden, they create, observe, and feel the changes in the garden, believing that the garden possesses the power to create something from nothing, they are convinced that this power gives them life. These two children, whose personalities were distorted by their loveless upbringing, bring new life to the once-sealed garden through their transformation of the environment. In their voluntary choices and work, they maintain self-acceptance, free themselves from psychological shadows and physical illness, and encourage those around them to break free from inner cages, transforming the entire estate's closed and gloomy environment.

“When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones,life began to come back to him.”1

Human perceptual systems and cognitive processes are closely related to the environment, and changes in environmental cues will have different degrees of impact on human psychological state and behavioural performance. Environmental cues include not only the objective space in which people are located, such as the place where they live or work, but also subjective emotional factors, such as interpersonal relationships and memories of the growth. Meanwhile, the brain, after receiving and processing environmental cues, issues behavioral and emotional instructions, providing individuals with the ability to make their own choices and change their environment. People can change their destiny by changing their environment,and it is important to maintain optimism and determination in the process. When individuals' autonomous choices align with their voluntary actions, a balance in interaction between environment and individuals can be achieved, thus facilitating self-improvement.

1 Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2012), 64.