It's just that they have money.

On Saturday afternoon, Fang Chen parked his car in the underground parking lot of Jiangcheng Art Museum.

He took the elevator to the first floor, walked through the lobby, and reached the door.

Sunlight streamed in through the glass curtain wall, illuminating the entire terrazzo floor with a white glow.

Zhu Zilan stood by the stone pillar at the entrance, wearing a black dress that fell just above her knees, with a neckline that was just right, and a thin leather belt around her waist.

Her hair was no longer loose as usual; it was tied up and pinned behind her head with a hairpin, revealing the lines of her ears and neck.

Fang Chen walked over, and Zhu Zilan nodded without smiling, but her gaze lingered a moment longer than usual.

"Go in."

Zhu Zilan walked slower than usual, with small steps and a very straight back.

The two people walked through the hall and into the exhibition hall.

The lights dimmed, with only light above the exhibits, like small pieces of sky being cut off and falling on each piece, while the rest of the space remained silent in shadow.

The exhibition hall is large, but there aren't many works, and there's plenty of space between each piece.

Zhu Zilan walked half a step ahead of Fang Chen, unhurriedly, like a boat sailing on a river she had traveled countless times, knowing every bend and every reef by heart.

She didn't talk much, but she would stop in front of each piece of art, say a few words, and then let Fang Chen look at it himself.

The first item was a painting, very large, almost taking up an entire wall.

You can't make out anything on the screen; large swaths of blue and green are mixed together, as if someone splashed it on or wiped it up with a mop.

Fang Chen stood in front for more than ten seconds.

"How is it?" Zhu Zilan asked.

"can't read."

"This work is called 'Lake.' The artist lived by the lake for a month, taking a photo at the same time and in the same place every day, and then painted it based on the colors in the photo. It's not about painting the shape of the lake, but about painting the changes in the lake's color over the course of a month."

Fang Chen looked at the painting again. The blues varied in shade, the greens were of varying brightness, and near the edge there was a small patch of grayish-brown, like something sunk at the bottom.

"That brown patch is from a rainy day," Zhu Zilan said.

Fang Chen nodded.

He was still at a level he couldn't understand, but at least he knew what the artist wanted to do.

It's not about expecting someone like him, who has no artistic talent, to understand it; it's about letting him know that someone once looked at a lake in this way.

The second item is a device.

A transparent glass box was filled with white slips of paper, each with a single word written on it.

From the outside, it looks densely packed, like snow frozen in a glass bottle.

Zhu Zilan said that the audience could open the box, take out a piece of paper, and then read the words on the paper aloud.

After reading it, put it back and replace it with another one.

Fang Chen stood still, neither taking the note nor speaking.

He felt a little bored.

The third piece is a video artwork projected onto the wall. The image shows a pair of hands kneading clay for a long time, shaping it into a bowl. Then they stop, knead the clay back into a ball, knead again, stop again, and knead again.

The loop repeated endlessly, without any sound. Fang Chen watched for less than a minute before walking away.

As we walked deeper into the exhibition hall, the lights became even dimmer.

A series of black and white photographs hang on the wall, depicting an old house being demolished. Each photo shows a detail—a window with peeling paint, a cracked wall, a stove that has been partially torn down.

The cut of the stove exposed red bricks, the edges of which were cracked, as if something had torn them apart from the inside.

Fang Chen stopped, and Zhu Zilan stood beside him.

"This is the core of my curatorial work."

Fang Chen turned to look at her.

Half of her face was illuminated by the spotlight on the wall, while the other half remained hidden in the shadows. The silver earring flashed in the light, like a glimmer on distant water, shattering at the slightest breeze.

He looked at the photo of the stove for a moment, then at the others next to it—windows, walls, roof tiles, each a fragment that had been removed from a house, each piece once part of a family's home.

"Where is the house photographed?" Fang Chen asked.

"An artist spent a month filming in an unknown little village before its demolition."

"Who lived in this house before?"

Zhu Zilan sensed something from Fang Chen's tone. She looked at him, remaining silent for a moment. "You know him?"

Fang Chen did not answer.

He stared at the cracked wall for a while, then looked down at the numbered labels on the ground.

It wasn't his old house, but he had seen the crack before. There was a crack on the wall of the main room of the old house, running from the roof all the way to the ground. Fang Yuan had plastered it with lime several times, but it would crack again after plastering.

"This artwork is not about demolition," Fang Chen said.

Zhu Zilan looked at him.

"When no one lives in a house, it will break down. When someone lives there, if it leaks, someone will fix it; if the walls are cracked, someone will patch them. When no one lives there, everything breaks down, so there's no need to tear it down; it will collapse on its own."

The artist's expression and Fang Chen's expression are not the same thing.

"You just said you didn't understand it, but now you do, don't you?"

"I understand houses, not art."

Zhu Zilan did not respond.

The two people stood in front of the set of photos and remained silent for a moment.

The exhibition hall was quiet. In the distance, someone was speaking softly in front of another artwork. The voice was indistinct, just a muffled buzzing sound.

Fang Chen looked at the set of photos again and walked to the last one.

That photo wasn't of a house; it was of a wild grass growing on the ruins.

"What about this one?" he asked.

"This piece is called 'Afterwards.' The artist said that after the house was demolished, she thought everything was gone. But when she went back in the summer, she found that the ruins were overgrown with weeds, a mess, not at all what the artist considered beautiful and self-indulgent. So she felt that the life of the house had ended, but the life of the land had not. Whether to demolish or not is a matter for people, and has nothing to do with the land."

Fang Chen stared at the photo for a few seconds and then said, "If this grass grew on my house's foundation, the first thing my mom would do is pull it out."

The two continued walking forward to the last area of ​​the exhibition hall.

There is only one artwork here, which occupies an entire wall.

It was a video projected on the wall, showing a person walking back and forth in a room, from one end to the other and back again.

There was no sound, no plot, and no close-ups.

The camera remains motionless, like an eye fixed to a wall watching a person fixed in a room.

Fang Chen stood there for a while, about two minutes, and the person walked back and forth twice. Then he saw the progress bar on the screen, showing a total duration of fifty minutes.

He turned around and said, "There's quite a gap between this artist's talent and his self-perception."