COMA is pleased to present the first Australian exhibition by Beijing-based Chinese artist You Jin (b. 1979), titled Synapse, on view from 21 November, 2025 to 10 January, 2026 at 37 Chapel Street, Marrickville, Sydney, NSW 2204.
This new body of work extends You Jin’s ongoing exploration of perception, consciousness, and the boundless terrains of thought. Anchored in the artist’s reflections on the brain as not simply as a biological organ, but as a vast cosmology, a multidimensional site where thought, imagination, and existence interlace. The exhibition considers how neural networks might reveal new models for existence, bridging the real and the imagined, the material and the transcendental. For You Jin, these networks are both the architecture of perception and the source of myth: a system that allows us not only to interpret reality but to build entirely new worlds beyond its bounds.
Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff". You Jin takes this premise further: the brain is not merely a mirror of the universe but a force that exceeds it, capable of generating dimensions that transcend what we can see, measure, or rationalise. 'Synapse' reflects this conviction, presenting a constellation of paintings where a multitude of structures and environmental depictions serve as recurring motifs — symbols of life in flux, the infinite elasticity of consciousness, and the porous boundary between the real and the imagined.
The neuron occupies a central role in You Jin’s iconography. Its branching dendrites and luminous synapses reappear across canvases as webs of light, radiating lines, and clusters of spheres. In the artworks Shifting worldview (2024) and Neuron drifting narratives (2025), these networks are rendered with both biological precision and cosmological scale, suggesting that the firing of synapses may be indistinguishable from the drift of constellations. In this sense, his work belongs to a lineage of artists - ranging from Paul Klee to contemporary digital abstractionists - who visualise invisible systems of knowledge and
perception.
While the paintings draw largely from neuroscience, they are equally indebted to philosophical and cultural traditions. In In between nature and algorithms (2025), scattered spheres are linked by radiant lines, recalling both computer networks and zodiacal charts. Here, computer science and astrology are not opposing but contiguous systems of meaning, both seeking to rationalise the structures that underlie human experience.
This bridging of science and mysticism echoes what historian of science Georges Canguilhem called the “vital tension” between empirical knowledge and lived experience. You Jin’s canvases refuse to privilege one over the other. His forms suggest that consciousness is produced not solely by biological function nor solely by metaphysical speculation, but through the entanglement of both. Water and floating spherical orbs recur as central motifs in this body of work. In an earlier painting, Drifting (2023), violet rings of water encircle these drifting spheres, evoking cyclical rhythms of flow and return. The sphere itself is a mutable signifier: at times a seed, at times a star, at times a fruit, as seen in Kiwi in mind (2024) - potentially - life unfolding, knowledge ripening, consciousness expanding.
If the neuron anchors You Jin’s cosmology, the heart complicates it. In A heart all-encompassing (2025), a red organ-like form encases inner worlds against a backdrop of simultaneous sun and moon. The work positions the heart complement as well as counterpoint to the brain: emotional, contradictory, and capacious. Here, the artist stages an essential paradox. Consciousness arises from contradiction—between heart and brain, science and mysticism, optimism and despair. The paintings do not resolve these oppositions but dwell within them, suggesting that the very act of thinking depends on such
tensions.
