The exhibition was held at Guo Yunlou Cultural and Art Center in Suzhou, an 150-year-old collector house with more than 800 types of books, artworks, and calligraphy from different historical periods in China. The complex itself, with the architectural structure and the yard with tea trees planted four generations ago. For the artist, Suzhou and Guo Yunlou is the perfect location for expressing feelings and emotions, which is different from the cities she lives in. As a result, the exhibited artworks at this exhibition is inspired by Guo Yunlou and created site-specifically. 

The exhibition, titled “Suddenly Moon White,” emphasizes the artist's surreal encounter with Guo Yunlou, inspired by a couplet from the Qing Dynasty owner Gu Wenbin's backyard garden Yi Garden at Guo Yunlou: “By the bamboo, under the pines, only plum blossoms are gifted, forming three benefits with the winter's cold; with the strong will amidst the moss and wild, rubbing against the rugged rocks, suddenly the moon is white over a thousand peaks," capturing the ancient literati's gatherings in the Gu family garden and their transcendent state of mind. The phrase "Suddenly Moon White" reflects the artist Dai Ying's otherworldly experience at Guo Yunlou, where the moonlight mirrors without distinction or duality. "Suddenly" conveys the artist's dreamlike, floating state in this place, timeless and uncertain of the era. "Moon White," mentioned in "The Records of the Grand Historian - Canonization Book," refers to the pale blue glow of the moon, a color and mood deeply adored by ancient literati and also the color of sacrificial robes decreed by Qing emperors, embodying a poetic, ancient, and profound cultural significance.

This exhibition unfolds gradually within the five-entry, three-courtyard space of Guo Yunlou. Through multiple correspondences between her works and the ancient architecture, the artist constructs a multi-dimensional dialogue across time, space, and culture. For instance, the use of plastic white lawns in the second and third courtyards dialogues between the contemporary and ancient worlds, where the artist uses utopian man-made objects to express a clean and beautiful Eastern poetic vision. In the center of the second courtyard's exhibition hall, Dai Ying introduces a new spatial installation using local soil, creating a dialogue between the large square soil installation and numerous square paintings on the walls. The soil symbolizes a deep connection with architecture, life, and locality, burying the past and nurturing all beings and the future, representing the beginning and end of life. Dai Ying's past paintings and new series seem to respond to this cycle of growth and rebirth. On the opening day of the exhibition, Dai Ying performed a special rendition of "Suddenly Moon White" at Guo Yunlou through performance art, filling the space with a compassionate aura as she continuously grasped and released the soil. This act also serves as an elevation of her 2020 sculpture installation Duration. Notably, two architectural columns placed on the soil—one wrapped in mirror material and the other preserving its ancient appearance—engage in a dialogue. A rusted circular disk installation on the wall, resembling a full moon, witnesses everything in the exhibition hall, conveying more of the artist's philosophical thoughts on "Suddenly Moon White."

In this exhibition, inspired by Guo Yunlou's collection of books and documents and her current state of mind, Dai Ying showcases a series of new works that radiate her explosive creativity within the poetic and profound cultural significance of the moon white color, characteristic of the Jiangnan region. Works like "Flowing Jade," "Cloud Head," "Qilin," and "Xie" break away from textual form, abstracting Chinese character structures into paintings, hidden within the pale blue, lustrous moon white color. Each stroke in the paintings reveals the artist's surrender of self and conventional thinking, alternating between spontaneity and inevitability. These ethereal yet precise artworks express and release the worldview of Chinese characters and ink painting through porcelain-like canvases and ink painting-like oil paint textures, intriguingly hinting at significant breakthroughs. Thus, Dai Ying, as a contemporary individual, engages in a dialogue with the ancients through various art forms at Guo Yunlou, freely expressing, exploring, paying tribute to, and commemorating the flourishing civilization passed down by predecessors while looking forward to the illustrious future of Guo Yunlou.

The exhibition also featured an artist talk between Dai Ying and Dr. Li-Chuan Evelyn Mai, the Associate Dean of Academy of Film and Creative Technology at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University on artistic creation and personal backgrounds.