It is an inexorable fact that every work of art is a response in some form. Irish artist Brendan Earley has created works in response to Beijing, where he was an artist-in-residence at Galerie Urs Meile last year. One might hazard the suggestion that Beijing is a city that is particularly difficult to elucidate. Its traffic, human and mechanical; layers of habitation—frequently temporary but sheltered from the uncomfortable climate by rapid-set concrete; endless breakage, dirt, and repair; consumption and competition; fragments sculpted into language and undivided skies of blue or grey revolving between day and neon-infected night above altering horizons. It is a city that incites one to operate rather than contemplate. This might be one description of the place Earley entered with the express awareness that cities penetrate the consciousness of their inhabitants until they themselves are assimilated into the urban fabric as “fractional embodiments” of it. In what is a notably cogent exhibition text, he acknowledges a shift by which humans no longer adapt to their habitat, but change it to suit to themselves. Yet in Beijing, the environment is such that people are forced to adapt: these artworks reflect on that reconciliation, standing somewhat tentatively amidst an accelerated …