Fan Jing Exhibition @ HdM Gallery, Beijing - "Fall to the Mortal World" Curated by Crystal Yao

Fan Jing

Fall to the Mortal World

HdM Gallery, Beijing

13 September - 25 October 2025

HdM GALLERY presents a solo exhibition by artist FAN JING. The exhibition features over ten of the artist’s paintings completed in the past two years.

 

This exhibition continues and further develops the themes of Fan Jing’s 2023 solo show: Fan Jing - As You Like It . As the title “Fall to the Mortal World”suggests, Fan Jing constructs scenes that appear to draw from mythological narratives, yet she romanticizes the most mundane, worldly “raw materials” and grafts them onto myth-inspired races. Through tensions filled with violence, conflict, and provocation, she pulls the “divine” down from its pedestal and creates a fallen paradise of the absurd.

 

Compared to her works of previous stage, Fan Jing has amplified the intentional sense of humor present in earlier stages. The conflicts and violence are now more direct; the figures take up a larger portion of the canvas, and the dynamics between them have become more complex and expansive. While female figures remain central to her work, their identities are more ambiguous than before—no longer clearly identifiable as the Young Pioneers, ballerinas, or housewives frequently seen in her earlier paintings. These monumental, sculptural "giants" heighten the visual tension with sharply pointed breasts, large and muscular limbs, and insect-like wings that seem to sprout from their bodies. The exaggerated sexual features are not eroticized but instead suggest aggression. Hybrid creatures—such as centaur-like women or butterfly ladies—appear on the scene, affirming the metamorphosis resulting from intense desires while intensifying the theatricality of the compositions.

 

Fan Jing’s strong technical foundation underpins her classical approach. She skillfully uses stage-like lighting to produce dramatic contrasts between light and shadow. In her current works, the use of highly saturated colors has been further reduced. Instead, detailed rendering and subtle transitions of light and shadow enhance the sense of volume in the painted subjects. These techniques contribute to the dramatic tension and sense of pressure within the compositions. A precarious sense of equilibrium also adds unease. In the work “Test Flight”, for example, the composition is visually balanced on both the vertical and horizontal axes, yet the entire weight of the central figure is precariously supported by only two pointed breasts—prompting the viewer to question the very nature of that stability. Similar balancing acts appear in other works as well. What is more daring is the way Fan Jing places exaggerated human poses into intense scenarios while deliberately positioning private body parts at the visual center of the composition—as seen in works like “Mother and Son” and “No-Fly Zone”. This marks an escalation from her earlier implicit provocations regarding the disciplining of the female body. Here, challenges to sexuality and identity are laid bare. Her attention to dislocation and disorder reflects a female gaze that observes and testifies to the absurdity of reality.

 

In “Fall to the Mortal World”, Fan Jing employs a subversive humor in portraying violent scenes, provoking open-ended interpretation through entanglement and confrontation.

 

Artist Fan Jing

 

Born in Beijing in 1983, Fan Jing graduated from Capital Normal University’s School of Fine Arts, majoring in oil painting. She currently lives and works in Beijing. Her work predominantly centers on the human figure and consistently explores the confrontation, conflict, and balance between opposing forces—both in content and form. Her paintings have been exhibited in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris, and Singapore, and are collected by important private collectors and foundations.

 

Curator Crystal Yao

 

Dr. Crystal Yao studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (MA Art History) and Department of Chinese of Sun Yat-sen University (PhD Modern Literature). She now lives in Beijing and works as an independent scholar and curator. She focuses on History of Material Culture and Media Studies, tends to work with artists from different intellectual backgrounds, and looks forward to fostering a new sensual experience that connects and creatively transforms classical and early modern Chinese cultural resources in a global context.

HDM GALLERY - BEIJING

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

hdmgallery.com

Fan Jing @ HdM Gallery, Beijing - "As You Like It" Exhibition

Fan Jing - As You Like It

HdM Gallery, Beijing

23 September - 28 October 2023

The name of the exhibition is taken from Shakespeare's classic comedy "As You Like It", but the artist did not write a fairy tale with a perfect ending like the play. On the contrary, in the whole exhibition, she created countless stories that happened after the "happy ending" viewed through one "closed" space after another, each of them appropriating classic stories in traditional stage plays and classical paintings. Besides the story itself, we can't ignore the artist's solid painting foundation and tribute to classical painting. The relationship among the picture’s structure, the picture expression and the title of the work forms a stable combination, which makes the artist form his own "trinity" when facing a new kind of figurative painting.

 

The strong contrast between light and shade in the picture has not only become a way to interpret Fan Jing's recent works but also helped the works to deepen their symbolic meaning, creating a very tense dramatic atmosphere and a strong emotional tension. The picture structure is crossed by "marked diagonal lines" that seem to be dynamic, but which in fact lend the pictures a balance and a quivering stability. The highly participative and dramatic composition arrangement not only constitutes a closed and stable space but also enhances the evocative power of the characters. Subtle tone changes also highlight very subtle texture differences between objects; an "image" with a sense of volume appears in the rigorous framework in the center of the stage as a combination filled with antagonism, giving a dramatic interpretation of a busy life full of spiritualism. In “Happy Ending”, a fuzzy space and soft light fill the whole picture, and the boundary between light and shadow becomes blurred until both blend. The wrestling fairies in “The Battle of the Fairies” are in the center of the whole drama, and they are also the focus of the picture. The chiaroscuro method makes the audience as close as possible to the space where the event takes place, and the reduction of apparent horizon strengthens this sense of participation again, making people immerse themselves in the image. However, in “Young Hero”, the characters are suddenly focused by light rising from a dark background, suggesting that a fierce drama has just ended and this naturally forms a set of intertextualities with “The Battle of the Fairies”. In “Death of the Swan” and “The Battle of the Fairies”, a very real sense of strength emerges from the tight and elastic muscles of the characters, and this tension is not only reflected in their bodies but also in their emotions. In “Death of the Swan”, a harsh light is shined from the top down, and the diagonal line from top to bottom cuts through the initially calm picture, which reminds people of the secret visual experience brought by “The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa”. The plump and round body with the strong light source directly caters to most men's imagination and stereotype of the female image, and the ballerina performs within narrow confines and in an atmosphere of passive submission, which is full of aggression and provocation. The expression of "aggression" of the body also appears in works such as “Appropriate Education”, “Young Hero”, “Group Exercise”, “Psalm”, “Housewife”, etc. Women's bodies are no longer soft, and the inverted clothing structure also loses the proper function of clothing. The hard chest and the human body distorted by strenuous exercise make different social roles (female students, ballerinas, maids, and housewives) in the picture have a profound and implicit relationship between art and human identity. This misplaced identity image also implies a tangled relationship between visual control and power structure. In this exhibition, Fan Jing's works combine dramatic plots with her exploration of fiction and fantasy, which is full of infinite possibilities for interpretation.

 

FAN JING, born in Beijing in 1983, graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts of Capital Normal University. She studied under Duan Jianwei and now lives and works in Beijing. Fan Jing's works often focus on depicting characters, and her works always focus on the confrontation, conflict, and balance between "force" and "tension" in terms of picture content and picture form. Her works have been exhibited in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris, Singapore, and other places, and have been collected by important private collectors and foundations.

HDM GALLERY - BEIJING

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

hdmgallery.com

Updated Post 05.10.2025