This project consists of a multimedia exhibition of Christus Nóbrega, showcasing his artistic production during the period when the artist participated in an artistic residency program by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in partnership with the Central Academy of Fine Arts – CAFA, in Beijing, between October and December 2015. This was the first experience of its kind involving a Brazilian artist in China.

The title of the exhibition associates the artist's name, in Chinese, with the idea of an adventure narrative characterized by extraordinary situations that a protagonist experiences. The logograms 龍沛森 represent his name, pronounced as Lóng Pèi Sēn. The first logogram means "dragon," the second means "abundant," and the third means "forest." In a loose translation, it means "one who does blessed and great things."

The Chinese curator Tifany Beres, along with the cultural team from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, selected the artist to participate in the residency program, considering that his body of work, much of it created using a plotter and laser cutting technique—which bears similarities to Chinese paper cutting—presented the best opportunities for establishing poetic and intercultural dialogues with China.

Due to the various intersections that occurred during the artist’s immersive experience in a foreign territory, a multimodal exhibition was conceptualized. It consists of a video show and educational actions, aimed at providing visitors with an experience akin to the one Nóbrega went through, filled with events that brought him closer to aspects of Chinese culture, resulting in visual poetics formed by narratives of contact and dissonance with the situations he encountered.

The works included in the exhibition consist of eight series that traverse the languages of photography, performance, and GPS drawings. These are meant to be paired with a small selection of videos and some educational activities, forming the full exhibition. The series are titled as follows:

The idea that guides the curatorial concept is linked to the kind of experience that arises when an artist is in a state of transit, conditioned, in some way, by the circumstances imposed by the residency, combined with the background the artist carries, which culminates in a visual universe full of discursive layers.

The construction of Nóbrega’s artistic production begins before his journey to China. Some literary and cultural sources prompted the artist to reflect poetically on the country. The chosen references are enigmatic, thus stimulating artistic invention. They include: the Chinese encyclopedia known as the Empório Celestial de Conhecimentos Benévolos (Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), mentioned in a book by Jorge Luis Borges, whose existence is doubtful and became the subject of the artist’s investigation in libraries in Beijing; the I-Ching, also known as the Book of Changes, an ancient oracular book; the writings Diary of a Madman (1918) and The Kite (1925), both by Lu Xun, a poet, writer, editor, translator, and literary critic, recognized as the most prominent Chinese writer of the early 20th century; and various publications on calligraphy.

In the case of this exhibition, which specifically addresses the artistic poetics resulting from the artist’s encounter with China, discursive complexity is an essential part of forming a complex and vibrant panorama of a country with 1.3 billion inhabitants, filled with mythologies for the Western audience. This is largely due to the language, which is inaccessible to other cultures, but also because of the censorship applied to the media.

This hermetic context, which blocks our knowledge and perception of what Chinese society is, opens, on the other hand, doors to the artist’s imagination. The artist invents worlds based on what he sees and feels, trying to translate this sense of strangeness into visual poetics, allowing the viewer to discover facets of Chinese society, particularly in Beijing. To establish a curatorial concept alongside an exhibition design that reveals the richness of this experience, it was necessary to consider several arguments that were present during the two months of the residency. These arguments revolve around the following issues: landscape/city; innovation and maintenance; symbology. And finally, the temporality that permeates the entire concept.

The awareness that the foreigner would constantly be inhabited by the Brazilian identity hovered over the artist’s vision, influencing his choices and impacting the curation, as outlined below:

1. LANDSCAPE/CITY: The artist's approach to the foreign territory, aiming to build a poetic framework for the residency, was based on the idea of constituting a space so that it becomes a place. For this to happen, the space must be re-signified to gain presence, body, and meaning for the one who perceives it. To achieve this, Nóbrega proposed two research axes that guided his poetic work, which were incorporated into the curatorial concept and exhibition plan, named See-landscape and Be-city. In the first case, the artist positioned himself at a distance, in a situation of area recognition, acting as an observer. In the second situation, the artist becomes more actively involved, immersing himself in the city’s daily life. Both contexts serve as fertile grounds for self-discovery.

2. INNOVATION/MAINTENANCE: The perception of being a foreigner also arose from the realization of differences between Brazilian and Chinese cultures. These differences are vividly present in the artists' inventions and production methods. Nóbrega defined them as existing between the desire for innovation, typical of Western society, and the pursuit of maintaining tradition, characteristic of Eastern culture.

3. SYMBOLISM: The symbol is a form of visual presentation that is synthetically quick to perceive but essentially complex, as it carries a series of attributes that only reveal themselves after an understanding of its constituent aspects. In the case of China, particularly, unveiling these aspects requires much observation, which Nóbrega undertook throughout the process. The symbolism stemming from color also provides another meaningful layer for the artist to establish bridges between being foreign and being Chinese: green and yellow gradually give way to the color red, which takes on meanings distinct from those composed of the artist's social and emotional memory, as he comes to better understand the status of red in that society.

The curation proposes integrating all these axes by constructing spaces that will differ from one another, guided by the notions of strangeness and recognition that Christus Nóbrega experiences in foreign territory.

The artist’s residency experience in China is an extraordinary occurrence because, in addition to the unprecedented nature of the action itself, as highlighted in the project’s introduction, it involves two other issues that generate interest: the artist residency phenomenon, which emerged globally in the 1990s and gained tremendous momentum within the artistic field as a form of work that stimulates displacement and network exchange; and the opportunity to study Chinese culture and art, whose intricacies and complexities are still unknown to the Brazilian public, which only has access to some facets brought by the Chinese community settled in Brazil, allowing access only to a small portion of what is done, thought, and produced in the most populous country in the world.