Familiar strangeness is the frayed edge of the memory, before it is trimmed and made neat. In our era of digital overload, our minds often stumble upon moments when the familiar suddenly turns strange—a common character loses its meaning after we gaze at it too long, a well-known melody sounds oddly out of place in a new setting. This is the sensation of jamais vu: when the known becomes alien, and the reality slips into uncertainty.

Xu Chenyang captures this delicate, in-between state in his visual art, inviting viewers into a threshold between the memory and the imagination, the reality and the surreal. Through subtle transformations of classic motifs—castles, scholar’s rocks, ladders, horses—he distills this cognitive experience into visual fables. His canvases become Rorschach tests for our sense of the reality, where the almost-recognizable forms reflect the workings and limits of our own perception.

In Xu’s world, the audience is gently unsettled, caught between what they remember and what they cannot quite name, discovering the poetry that lies in the ambiguity between knowing and not knowing.

熟悉的陌生感是記憶的毛邊未被裁剪前的狀態。在資訊超載的數字時代，我們的認知系統不斷經歷著熟悉事物突然變得陌生的瞬間——一個常用漢字在長時間注視後被迫喪失意義，一段熟悉旋律在特定情境下顯得怪異。

徐晨陽成功地在視覺領域重現了那種「似曾相識卻又全然陌生」的心理狀態，邀請觀眾進入一個介於記憶與想像、現實與超現實之間的臨界空間。通過城堡、太湖石、梯子、馬匹等經典意象的微妙變異，徐晨陽將這種認知體驗昇華為可凝視的視覺寓言。他的畫布成為測試現實感知的羅夏墨蹟，觀眾在那些似曾相識又難以指認的物象中，照見自己認知系統的運作機制與局限。