Zhao Yinou @ HdM Gallery, Beijing - "Ghost Raising" Exhibition

Zhao Yinou: Ghost Raising

HdM Gallery, Beijing

Through 28 June 2025

ZHAO YINOU

2024-25.3, 150 × 220 cm, 2024-2025

© Zhao Yinou, courtesy HdM Gallery

ZHAO YINOU

2025.4, 150 × 220 cm, 2025 

© Zhao Yinou, courtesy HdM Gallery

ZHAO YINOU

2025.10, 50 × 35 cm, 2025

© Zhao Yinou, courtesy HdM Gallery

ZHAO YINOU

2020-25.14, 150 × 220 cm, 2020-2025

© Zhao Yinou, courtesy HdM Gallery

HdM Gallery presents “Ghost Raising”, the latest solo exhibition of Zhao Yinou. This is Zhao Yinou’s third solo exhibition at HdM Gallery after “On the Wings of A Swan” in 2022. The exhibition features over 30 works on canvas and wood, alongside the artist’s first experimental integration of sound installations within painting. Zhao’s recent practice delves into meditations on eternity, transforming diffuse collective memories of our era-viewed through the microscopic lens of individual experience-into layered spatiotemporal structures. 

Light

Light is the universe’s primal language—formless yet shaping all visible forms. In Zhao Yinou’s oeuvre, light manifests itself as a spiritual presence: the sacred light, the arbitrary light, the stalemate light, and the repressed light appear repeatedly in different densities and in different stages of her creation, forming multiple echoes between the artist her spatiotemporal self. In her new artworks, light appears in every infinite texture and space radiated by herself, becoming a link connecting countless parallel spaces: on ice, sea, trees, mountains, and grasslands, resembles a fleeting blink of cosmic radiance.

 

Dust

The traces after "burning" are not only the suspension of material particles in the layers of paint, but also the poetic interval between the artist's memory and the present. Zhao Yinou's creation does not rely on linear narrative. She restrains and selects emotions and memories in a cross-dimensional perspective. Time is distorted into any frame that can be extracted in the physical dimension, and transformed into repeated brushstrokes and spray-painted textures on the canvas. Layered surfaces do not merely obscure but capture emotional variables through accumulated dust, extrapolating potential parallel worlds. The delayed emotional catharsis and stratified “dust” forge an intangible distance between artwork and viewer, immersing audiences in a heterogeneous field of overlapping time and space—a realm both visual and psychic.

 

Breath

The sound installation incorporated into this exhibition leads the audience into the artist's sealed field with a flowing energy that can be perceived in multiple dimensions. The low hum on the back of each artwork once again forms a kind of unspeakable "interval" with the audience. The "breath" of hearing drives the "breath" of vision. Between one breath and another, time is like a lie, the future collapses into the past, and the past flows towards the end.

 

Reignition

The brevity inherent in the  existence of human beings in the universe is heavy and depressing; in this unburned box, Zhao Yinou uses almost always monochrome paint to visualize abstract emotions into an existence that jumps out of time and space, in the rational laws of physics, she uses a silent declaration to outline a love letter, which is eternally entangled in the vast smoke.

 

ZHAO YINOU was born in 1972 and currently lives and works in Paris. She was  the producer of documentaries “À l'ouest des rails” and “He Fengming”. Recent group and solo exhibitions include: “Being of Evils”, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2020); “Psychicalreality”, Space Station, Beijing, China (2019); “Prisonnier”, Vanities, Paris, French (2019); “HAPPY PEOPLE......”, Inside-out Art Museum, Beijing, China (2019); “HER KIND•CHUANG”, Zhuzhong Art Museum, Beijing, China (2018); “The Pleasures of Adventures”, N3 gallery, Beijing, China (2016); “OPEN TO YOU”, Pusan, Korea (2014) and etc. 

HdM GALLERY

798 East Road, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing

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Zhao Yinou: Ghost Raising

HdM Gallery, Beijing, 17 May - 28 June 2025

Ceramist Alain Vernis @ HdM Gallery, Beijing - "Black" Exhibition

Alain Vernis | Black 

HdM Gallery, Beijing

9 April - 10 May 2025

HdM Gallery and Luohan Tang present Black, a solo exhibition by artist ALAIN VERNIS. The exhibition features over a dozen ceramic bowls, focusing on the artist’s exploration and enlightement of ceramics over the years.

Alain Vernis: The charm of simplicity

Alain Vernis's works are mainly pottery bowls. Since he set up his studio in the Haut-Morvan in 1985, he has started to make pottery with local clay. Alain Vernis didn’t learn from a master, he relied on his own exploration from kiln construction to firing. The primitive pit that he used then caused all of the pieces, shaped over ten years, to explode. He had no choice but to give up pit firing and build a new kiln. After years of adjustments, he came to discover the effects of diverse combinations of clay, water, duration of firing, type of wood. Black was once used by Taoism to discribe the invisible and intangible universe, “Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding. ”  Darkness presents color and also the profoundness of Taoism. Alain Vernis uses black extensively in his works, shaping through “renouncement” and firing with “naturalness” . The combination of shape and glaze color explains the charm of simplicity.

 

Alain Vernis: Deep connection with Raku-yaki technique

The famous Raku-yaki technique of the Momoyama period in Japan in the 16th century is characterized by simplicity and naturalness. The seemingly "imperfect" works break the traditional aesthetic system of symmetry and glaze perfection, which is similar to Alain Vernis's works. Starting with a handful of clay, Alain focuses his perception on his hands and slowly kneads the bowl into shape, combining the beauty of form with the beauty of spirit. The surface of the bowl is either smooth or rough, with the glaze color bolding, and even natural flow appears. However, it was not until the 15th generation of Raku-yaki master invited him to Japan that he realized that he had such a deep connection with those masters of several centuries ago.

 

Alain Vernis was born in Sens, France in 1946 and currently lives and works in Morvan. His works have been exhibited in art institutions such as the Biracte Archaeological Museum in Burgundy, Guardian Art Center in China and Musée d‘art Moderne, Musée national de la Céramique, Musée de Bibracte, Musée Asrien Dubouché, Musée Bernard Palissy, Musée de Sarreguemines, Musée Joseph Séchelette in France.

HdM GALLERY

798 East Road, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing

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Alexander Tinei Exhibition @ HdM Gallery, Beijing

Alexander Tinei 

HdM Gallery, Beijing 

8 April - 13 May 2023 

Alexander Tinei (born in 1967 in Caushani, Moldova) lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. He studied at Chisinau Repin State Collage of fine arts, Moldova between 1988- 1991. Alexander Tinei's art is that of an interested painter concerned with his subjects. A true figurehead of his movement "New Figurative Painting", he has established himself in Europe as a painter with a rich technique. Until 2013 his work is characterized by a dark atmosphere, where oil on canvas is combined with collages to deconstruct his characters and landscapes.

 

Today when color emerges, the disconcerting energy of Alexander Tinei's works remains untouched. His popular sources of inspiration: newspapers, magazines, photographs are mixed with his own melancholic memories, his friendships, and what he sees. An adorer of Lucas Cranach's Mannerist painting, Alexander Tinei works to perpetuate the interest of his elders in the atmosphere that a body can suggest, the aura of a person on its environment.

 

The most recent works are particularly interested in the boundary between the internet and privacy, the way in which images are treated by their frames very differently. In each of the works, the bodies fade, become morcelled, to the point where the individual lives only as a spectre or disembodied image of himself. Only faces remain visible, bluish veins that run through his work.

 

Through this process of social study, of deconstruction of the body, Alexander Tinei dives back into his own childhood under the Soviet era where the individual in the mass disappears and where fiction and its discourse intrude into reality. Solo exhibitions were staged at Erika Deak Galeria Budapest and Dukan Gallery Paris. Besides, his works were included in group shows at Budapest Gallery, Hungarian National Gallery and DSC Gallery Prague.

HdM GALLERY

798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing

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Isshaq Ismail @ HdM Gallery, Beijing - Allure

Isshaq Ismail: Allure

HdM Gallery, Beijing

20 September - 11 October 2022

Born in 1989 in Accra, Ghana, where he still lives and works, Isshaq Ismail is one of the most original figurative artists to have emerged from the African continent. Describing his portraits as “infantile semi-abstraction”, Ismail’s artistic practice tries to reduce the human figure to its most basic characteristics. He uses thick patches of bold colors dominating the surface of the canvas to give the impression of larger-than-life beings that are endowed with an almost three-dimensional aspect. Painted in red, purple, black or maroon, they question the audience’s expectation of figurative depiction and instead create the impression of a parallel world peopled with grotesque creatures both similar to human beings but different in appearance. 

Isshaq Ismail’s influences are many and varied. The legacy of modern art and its deconstruction of the human figure obviously comes to mind, as are the menacing features of African ritual masks. Finally, the Western tradition of silhouette portraits and caricature also looms large when one attempts to interpret Ismail’s figures. Isshaq Ismail has declared in the past that he is “interested in breaking the mould of painting by subverting and interrogating the preconceived notion of the idea of beauty within the canon of painting, and challenging the perception of aesthetics”.

 

A graduate from the Ghanatta College of Art and Design (Accra, Ghana), Isshaq Ismail has already been widely exhibited. Besides a solo show at Nicholas Roman Fine Art, New York, he has participated in group shows at Christies New York, Ross-Sutton Gallery, Choose Gallery (Stuttgart, Germany), Ghana’s National Museum and Absa Gallery (Johannesburg, South Africa).

HdM GALLERY

798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing

hdmgallery.com

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