In Shanghai at the end of the century, two men trapped in a sensory prison met.
Ji Xu, a top gallery curator, holds the power of a century-old shipping family in his left hand, and his right hand is dipped in turpentine and gold foil. His dark paintings, called "Hieronymus Bosch of the East" by Art Review, are actually childhood traumas sealed with acrylic resin - the twisted golden shackles on the canvas are forever locked to his mother who fell into the sea from the deck of a cruise ship when she was twelve years old.
Genius perfumer Chu Yan can use his sense of smell to deconstruct everything in the world. The "Memory Palace" series of perfumes he created made the elites of Wall Street investment banks willing to pay 10,000 yuan for one milliliter. But no one knew that this man who always wore a silver ring was gradually falling into a silent world due to olfactory neurodegeneration. That night when the last breath of orris root disappeared, he smelled the absinthe of the same frequency as his own blood in the ashes of Ji Xu's burning paintings.
When the auction hammer struck the price of 30 million, the turpentine seeping from the cracks in the canvas and the cedar scent from the overturned perfume bottle filled the air. They used each other's bodies as canvases, in the attic of the old French Concession, the secret room at No. 18 On the Bund, and the abandoned granary on the Suzhou River, using pain as the pen and desire as the paint to complete this redemption ceremony of life toward death.
Intent: This is a self-anatomy experiment using love as a scalpel. Explore how contemporary people complete spiritual patricide through forbidden love in the dual dilemma of capital alienation and sensory degradation, and reconstruct existential freedom on top of the ruins. Lust is not the end, but a prism that shines into the abyss of human nature. Every physical entanglement is a rebellion against the order of power, and every breath is questioning the ethical boundaries of art and business.