I have not loved (enough or worked) – the intimacy of the title speaks to the individual, implying that you yourself have not done enough, or calling into question what you have done. It is an emotionally moralistic title which measures your personal and professional productivity in relation to feelings of guilt, shame, anger and despair and to matters of connection, care for others, and care for the self.

Love cannot be separated from work. In addressing love’s relationship to labour – specifically the labour of love – knowing it is impossible to untangle love from work, and meaningless to suggest otherwise, this exhibition does not critique such labour as precarious or hidden. Nor does it suggest that work needs to be measured by compensation and utility or imply that it is wholly perpetuated by structures of power, as if such constructions are mutually exclusive, capable of containment and isolation. Instead, the exhibition reflects on how people hold themselves together and support each other is analogous to how nations, territories and regions construct and hold themselves together as a whole.

The work of each artist in this exhibition exists almost like an experiential, literary tale – one that opens out our experience of love and longing, loneliness and loss, and which contemplates how our understanding of these tangled, at times tortuous notions shape our relationships to the world as collectives, as pairs and as other social assemblies. The exhibition reveals how deeply enmeshed our bodies, and the subjective forces of love and desire, are within the fantasies of ‘the good life’.

Bringing together works in video, photography, painting and sculpture by Hai-Hsin Huang, Daisuke Kosugi, Pixy Liao, Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223), Rinko Kawauchi, Sejin Kim, Lieko Shiga, and Tao Hui, the exhibition articulates the ways that people are fragile, finite. Their bodies, their subjectivities, are composed of pathways that need careful guarding and constant negotiation, just as feelings, memories and emotions pour out from each of us and complicate all kinds of encounters. It is this energetic dualism that defines our cultural, social and economic worlds and that we can reshape by uttering our intentions, asking questions, formulating ideas and committing to lofty abstractions.

By doing this, we might open up nasty wounds behind our hearts, and name the layers of love and loss that animate us, that reveal how our vulnerability is not a weakness but rather a place from which we compose new ways of being in the world and with each other, as friends, family, workmates and lovers … or all at the same time. Such sentiments provide a platform to consider how these works were brought into being under an impulse to assert the complex existence of a temporal, multiply-inflected subject, in flux with the world around it. The project is an acknowledgment of the strange agency we fragile people have when we participate in that mobile re-shaping, together and alone.