The title of the exhibition takes its name from a series of murders that took place in Hong Kong in the 1980s. The perpetrator murdered four women and called himself the “The Female Butcher on A Rainy Night.” The case sent shockwaves through the Pearl River Delta at the time, while popular culture continued to reproduce it through a considerable number of films, television productions, and media narratives, even giving rise to copycat crimes. Yet popular interpretations of the case almost invariably pathologize the perpetrator, attributing the crimes either to some form of misfortune in his family background or childhood, while simultaneously treating violence as an exception. But if violence is attributed to abnormality, evil, or misfortune, can its effects truly be expelled from the everyday, allowing “us,” those shaken by it, to remain unscathed and preserve the integrity of our souls? Is this, in a cultural sense, a form of exemption from violence? As third parties—each of us who hears of it, watches it, or merely brushes against it—what responsibility do we bear for the circulation of violence? Is the disavowal of supremacism itself not contradicted by the unbearable fact that its object has already entered into a relation with “me,” and continues to haunt and disturb “me”? This was perhaps the question that initially set artist Mei Ruowen in motion—or, perhaps more precisely, the question that came to trouble her. What we encounter in her work is the accumulation of a difficult and sustained struggle with these questions.

“Rainy night” evokes a contradictory scene: cold and severe, washing away traces and concealing evidence; yet it is also associated with a sentimental affect, as though a rainy night were an image that invariably resides within the poetry of remembrance. The same condition thus splits into two forms of ethical appropriation. This doubleness is also embedded in Mei Ruowen’s practice. She is consistently activated by......