Tender Constraints

25/05/2024-050/06/2024

Tender Constraints 2024

Photo by Luan gallery

Tender Constraints: On Affective Discipline and the Politics of Intimacy
by J.A.Hao

In contemporary configurations of intimacy, power seldom reveals itself through command or coercion. More often, it arrives wrapped in affection, operating through the soft language of care: “I’m doing this for your own good,” “I only say this because I love you.” These expressions, while tender on the surface, function as affective norms—scripts that quietly govern how we relate, how we perform love, and how we define ourselves in relation to others. What results is a form of governance that is not enforced from the outside, but internalised—a quiet discipline of feeling.

Yuna Ding’s solo exhibition Tender Constraints explores this subtle but potent form of emotional regulation. Rather than framing love as simply a site of connection or healing, Ding examines it as a field of negotiation, where intimacy is structured by expectations, and where care may carry within it the logics of control. When love is framed as a responsibility, or care becomes a moral obligation, the boundaries of the self begin to dissolve—gently, but persistently.

Drawing from her personal experiences in intimate relationships, Ding does not present autobiography in a direct sense. Instead, she translates affective experience into a carefully constructed visual language. Using illustration and soft, pliable materials, she creates spatial compositions that invite tactile and emotional engagement. Within these installations, recurring motifs—such as fish, apples, and cage-like structures—form a symbolic lexicon. They evoke nourishment and restriction, vulnerability and containment. While rooted in specific emotional contexts, these images also function abstractly, pointing toward broader dynamics of desire, dependency, and entanglement.

The term tender constraints encapsulates the paradox at the heart of the exhibition. These are not barriers that impose, but that seep. They do not push against us, but move through us. Such constraints are difficult to name precisely because they operate under the guise of affection. They reconfigure our capacity to act, to speak, to define ourselves—not by silencing us outright, but by shaping what we believe we should feel or do in order to remain lovable, acceptable, or “good.” In this sense, the exhibition participates in a broader theoretical conversation on affective discipline and the politics of intimacy: how emotional life becomes a site for the exercise of power, not through violence, but through care.

Ding’s works do not offer resolution. There are no clean answers, no fixed meanings. Instead, the exhibition functions as a diagnostic space—a set of scenes and symbols through which the viewer is invited to recognise, reflect, and perhaps even re-experience the contradictions of their own emotional lives. The artist’s refusal to moralise is deliberate: she does not judge the mechanisms she reveals, but lays them bare, allowing audiences to feel their internal operations.

Presented by Luan Gallery, Tender Constraints marks Yuna Ding’s debut solo exhibition in China. It brings together a selection of her recent multimedia works, united by an ongoing inquiry into intimacy, identity, and affective boundaries. This is both a mapping of personal terrain and a critical engagement with the shared emotional grammars of contemporary life. Through the quiet power of materials and metaphor, Ding offers not only a reflection on how we love, but a deeper question: at what cost do we remain tender?