While Romanticism traditionally positioned humanity before the grandeur of nature, here the gaze turns toward a world where agency and presence emerge from plants, mannequins, and imagined ecologies rather than human protagonists. Rather than projecting dystopian collapse, the work presents a quieter and more introspective posthuman vision—shaped by stillness, endurance, and the slow time of nonhuman rhythm.

In Appleby’s acrylic paintings, flora take on a near-sentient presence, inhabiting interiors and symbolic terrains where light, personal objects, and memory coalesce. His early engagement with retro video game aesthetics has gradually given way to a more contemplative visual language—one in which imagined landscapes emerge from the textures of the everyday. Familiar domestic spaces—a bedroom landing, a spare room, a distant hillside in the northwest of England—unfold into sites of quiet revelation. In one image, a reclining figure gently recalls the contours of a northern hill; in another, the plant becomes a gesture toward knowledge and interdependence. Orchids, bonsais, and daffodils serve as witnesses to solitude, duration, and inner transformation. Here, the divine is not distant but embedded—in the glint of a ring, the curve of a stem—where the domestic and the transcendental coexist. His work affirms that the nonhuman world is not a backdrop, but a reflective presence with its own quiet agency.

Jiang’s ink paintings turn the inquiry inward, reconfiguring the posthuman body through which the biological and the artificial are blurred within classical references and digital logics. Her cyborgian figures recline within staged interiors, suspended between self and screen, natural form and synthetic surface. Imagined flora, a recurring and significant motif in her practice, complicates this boundary further; hermaphroditic plant forms blur distinctions between human and nonhuman, body and environment, introducing a vegetal agency that is both symbolic and sensual. Executed with the refined precision of traditional Chinese gongbi technique, Jiang’s work merges with psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, producing figures that are hyper-stylised yet emotionally ambiguous. Here, sexuality, perception, and femininity fragment and reform in stillness. The body appears both composed and exposed, theatrical yet introspective—a site of self-recognition that is always mediated.

Together, Appleby and Jiang construct an ecosystem in which human presence is decentred rather than erased. Their work does not mourn the human; it outgrows it, gesturing toward new modes of coexistence and relationality. Romance Without Us proposes an aesthetic of persistence. Their practices compel a reconsideration of presence and subjectivity in an era increasingly shaped by ecological precarity and digital mediation, inviting an ethics of attentiveness to the diverse forms of being that populate contemporary existence.