Aya Abu Hawash, We Sat Inside The Distance, 2026 by, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
A Labyrinth
The labyrinth is not confusing.
It's a system that keeps things out of reach.
Nothing appears all at once. Things repeat, stop, disappear, come back differently. You understand it slowly, through getting lost, returning, waiting.
The labyrinth is not mythology anymore.
It exists in everyday life, in the corridor of an apartment building where every door looks the same and you suddenly stop knowing where you are. Familiarity itself starts to feel strange.
To enter a labyrinth is to give up moving straight ahead.
The body slows down. It turns back, pauses, doubts itself. Every direction feels uncertain. The movement is physical, but also emotional shaped by fear, anticipation, memory, instinct.
You learn the labyrinth early.
As a child, it lives inside familiar places that suddenly no longer feel safe. A door you hesitate to open. A hallway that
changes at night. You learn space through tension, through guessing what might happen, through testing where safety ends.
Across memory, images, and space, the labyrinth keeps returning as a condition. It is built from repetition, from archives, from ordinary structures, from things carried since childhood.
Inside a Labyrinth space and distance become a gesture against disappearance. The Violence occupation of the Labyrinth destroys conditions of intimacy, reduced to a nostalgia tied to a place.
The distance does not trap you. It changes the way you move, the way you look, the way you understand where you are.
There is no clear entrance.
No final way out.
Only the movement through it.
We invite you to the records of these movements-the individual labyrinths faced by four artists from Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art.
Featured mediums including: photography, ceramics, painting, mix media and textile
About the Artists
Aya Abu Hawash (@Ayaabuhawashart)
Aya Abu Hawash's practice is articulated through interconnected investigations into intimacy, distance, feeling, and political memory within images and archives. she approaches images not as representations, but as structures that produce sensations of closeness and withdrawal, desire and absence. The image becomes a charged space where intimacy is negotiated, determining how close we are
allowed to be and when distance is imposed.
Hyoji Lee (@leehyozi)
Hyoji Lee is an artist based in South Korea and London. With a background in Korean Painting and the fashion industry at Incheon National University, she is currently pursuing an MFA at Goldsmiths. A two- consecutive-year recipient of the Arts and Sports Vision National Scholarship from the Korean Ministry of Education, she debuted with a solo exhibition in the 'International Young Korean Artists' series at the CICA Museum, followed by a residency with the Incheon Yeonsu Cultural Foundation.
She explores the fluid distance that arises between individuals, others, and the systems of society. In this exhibition, Lee turns her attention to the apartment - the defining habitat of contemporary life - tracing the Absence felt within a crowd and the silent Pressure of the system, through cold geometric landscapes
concealed behind meticulously designed grids.
Xinyan (Yanis) Mao (@getanew.yanis)
Xinyan (Yanis) Mao is a Chinese artist based in London, currently studying for an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths. With a background in Environmental Design, her practice explores public space and everyday emotional experience through weaving, images and text.
Her work begins with her daily walk between home and school. It explores the unease, judgment, and alertness that appear when moving through the city. For her, a route is not only a way from one place to another. It also records the body's reactions: where she slows down, what makes her feel uneasy, and when she wants to change direction. In this work, she uses weaving to bring these feelings together. The images and text fragments come from online news, becoming reminders, warnings and signals within the work. Rather than making an accurate map, she wantsto record an emotional experience of public space, shaped by the body, a sense of danger, and everyday movement.
Zhuping Zhong(@zhuping_z)
Zhuping Zhong is from Shanghai and is currently based in London. She is studying for an MFA at Goldsmiths. Her work includes mixed-media paintings and found-object installations.
Zhuping's artistic practice explores the in- between space - the boundary where memory and reality, the virtual and the material, and the private and the public interact. She experiments with a variety of media, including pastels, acrylics, and watercolours, and uses found objects to create installations. Her work is an unsettling game that presents viewers with an overlapping dimension where chaos and danger hide behind daily life. Recently, Zhuping's work has focused on the dangers inherent in playful behaviour and its connections to family, society and human nature, exploring how these elements interweave to shape our understanding of the world around us.