Let's Walk: On Care, Connection, and Feeling

Some feelings precede words. Others stay because words elude them. The exhibition "Hey, Let's Walk Together – Walking with Care" begins with writing to stay with these moments.

The exhibition, initiated in collaboration with the Italian notebook brand Moleskine, utilizes notebooks as its primary medium. It features a collection of written and visual works that focus on the theme of care.

The curatorial team collaborated with hospitalized patients, long-term Moleskine users, and invited participants. The exhibition shows real and diverse emotional records – fragments of experience that are hard to articulate – through handwriting, drawing, and informal marks.

Situated within Shanghai Mental Health Center, No. 600's Gallery occupies a unique position as both a medical institution and a cultural space. It offers a place where emotions that are difficult to fully explain can still be seen and understood.

"We wanted to build a bridge between living individuals and the cold labels of illness, a bridge that leads to the inner world," Shen Jie from the center said.

Through artistic expression, people are no longer defined by diagnosis but by their inner richness and emotional presence.

Often overlooked in public narratives, the exhibition puts a perspective on caregivers. Family and friends are informal caregivers, while doctors, nurses, and social workers are formal. Their works depict care as a complex relationship with closeness, responsibility, fatigue, uncertainty, and tenderness.

Shen also notes that caregivers must manage emotional stress by writing, walking, or listening to others' stories.

Moleskine CEO Christophe Archaimbault says the exhibition goes beyond art.

"What we are really working on is not the drawings themselves, but the stories behind them. That's what makes this exhibition unique. It's the first time we have a chance to work with a medical institute."

In this sense, the notebook becomes a container for lived experience rather than a finished result.

Rather than offering conclusions, "Hey, Let's Walk Together –Walking with Care" invites a pause. Page by page, the exhibition suggests that care can begin with attention, and that writing can be a quiet place where emotions are allowed to rest, be recorded, and gently returned to over time.

Date: Through March 26, 8am-4:30pm

Venue: No.600's Gallery 600号画廊

Address: 600 Wanping Rd S. 宛平南路600号