Li Songsong @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'History Painting' Exhibition

Li Songsong: History Painting

Pace Gallery, New York

November 7 - December 20, 2025

Li Songsong 

Revolution, 2025

© Li Songsong, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents History Painting, an exhibition of new paintings by the Beijing-based artist Li Songsong, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Showcasing a selection of paintings created this year, the presentation spotlights Li’s enduring engagement with history as both inspiration and substance for his work. History Painting is accompanied by an exhibition booklet from Pace Publishing featuring an essay by the gallery’s Curatorial Director, Xin Wang.

One of the most celebrated contemporary painters in China, Li Songsong has honed his distinct style—marked by his use of reliefs, bold brushstrokes, and solid color blocks—over the last 20 years as part of his pursuit “to paint something that had a certain distance from reality,” as he once put it. Contending with history, politics, and culture, Li’s art is forged in enactments of accumulation and subtraction, of exposure and obscuration. At once personal, imaginative, and truthful, his deeply expressionistic paintings often depict fragmented, semi-abstract figurations underpinned by narratives that the viewer is invited to decipher and absorb.

Over the last several decades, the artist has deconstructed and reconstructed recognizable images from newspapers, films, historical photographs, and other media, reinterpreting them through the lens of his own experiences and memories while also creating new textural dimensions within his works. In abstracting images from their original contexts, Li Songsong has cultivated a unique visual language that asks viewers to see the world in new terms—from a different aesthetic perspective.

“History has always been a prime substance, if not subject, throughout Li’s practice, and the artist works with it not as evidence, but as symptom and pathos,” Xin Wang writes in her new text for the artist’s  show. “It is not so jarring, then, that in his recent series explicitly titled History and Past, representational content has given way to the visceral and relational.”

In his presentation with Pace in New York, the artist, who has been represented by the gallery since 2009, shows new paintings from his body of work titled History, which he began in 2023. Entirely abstract, these paintings, all of which are square in format, can be understood as portraits of his ever-evolving relationship to the medium.

“This new group of works has lost its reliance on visual sources,” Li Songsong says. “I simply let the language extracted from (painterly) practice become the protagonist and construct a historical metaphor in the form of ‘painting.’”

Building up his compositions in grids as part of his process, Li Songsong uses color to express his state of mind at the moment the paint meets the surface of his canvases. He sees each of his brushstrokes as agentive and idiosyncratic, indelible and eternal even as they are folded ever deeper into the painterly layers and recesses of his works.

Li Songsong’s paintings animate the fragmentary nature of images and memory, paying particular attention to the people, events, and themes of modern and contemporary Chinese history. Li is interested in the way images cultivate histories and provoke memories, even if their relationship or reference to the past is nebulous and indirect. Although his compositions draw on found imagery—with a range of sources including restaurant advertisements, historical photographs, and movie stills, among others—Li freely reinterprets his sources, altering or omitting visual information. The resulting works eschew narratives, presenting pieces and traces of something rather than a totalizing record, creating new ways of looking at existing information.

PACE

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Guan Xiao @ Kunsthalle Wien - 'Teenager' Exhibition

Guan Xiao: Teenager 

Kunsthalle Wien

8 October 2025 – 11 January 2026 

Guan Xiao 

Jeanake, 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao 

Midhight Pancake, 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao 

Cyclemony, 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, 

Glitea, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Kunsthalle Wien presents the first solo exhibition in Austria by Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Chongqing, China). Comprising an entirely new body of sculpture and painting, it takes what Guan Xiao describes as the ‘ambiguous life stage’ of the teenager as a starting point for works that reflect upon the currents, conflicts and absurdities of a society impacted by the values of capitalism and liberalism:

A teenager is typically thought to be impulsive, led by their intuition and open to possibilities, changes and uncertainty. They can be dramatic, riven with self-doubt. I see them as both challenging and conquering reality and these ideas echo through this body of work which has a lot to do with this conflicted state of change and uncertainty. – Guan Xiao

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai; 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York 

and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin/Munich 

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, 

Torso, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist 

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, 

Torso, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist 

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

A large, furry A-Frame structure bisects the space, creating a tunnel at the centre of the exhibition. Animated by light, it harbours a collection of cast aluminium objects including scaled-up items of cutlery, a moka pot and a series of enlarged eggs. Outside are a series of gnarled tree roots cast in brass, painted and appended with motorcycle parts and cartoon-like clouds of scribble. These anthropomorphic sculptures with mesh plates or antennae-like wands populate the space like a cast of characters. Two modular columns extend respectively pink and blue arms from aluminium, claw-like bases that resemble oversized bunches of bananas. On the walls, a triptych of panels simulates large, palette-shaped windows covered in a thick layer of paint.

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, 

The spent siesta, like a sun-dried memory, 2025; Raining, 2025; 

Approaching Dust, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Guan Xiao 

Raining, 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and  

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao 

Raining (detail), 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao originally trained as a filmmaker before becoming known for creating sculpture that triggers an impulse for us to create our own narratives and tell stories about what we see. Earlier works resembled museological displays or photography studios that appeared to unite an eclectic selection of objects and images in one scheme. More recent sculpture refers to the Chinese custom of displaying polished tree roots in domestic settings. The practice of root carving dates back to the Warring States Period (474–221 BC), preserving the natural, given form of the wood. Its popularity over the centuries made it a symbol of economic wealth, while becoming a worn-out cultural cliché, denoting a lack of sophistication. In Guan Xiao’s work, the tree root becomes the basis of a singular, mythical creature in an ever-growing multitude of animal or human-like figures. Working with an array of elements – some meticulously hand-crafted, others mass produced – she references a broad range of cultural material that is defamiliarized and uncoupled from its associations to create an ambiguous, semi-fictional space and time.

Teenager returns to fundamental subjects such as food, clothing and shelter to address questions of progress and civilisation, tradition and spirituality that are central to the multi-faceted, playful and poetic work of Guan Xiao. The ‘conflicted state’ of the teenager is used as a metaphor for a society that the artist perceives to be suspended between ‘devotion and restraint’, needs and desires and ancient, philosophical, social and ethical values that are ‘in direct opposition’ to the economic system of capitalism:

China’s imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yets imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yets imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yet subculture, independent cultures throughout history emphasise individuality […]. This contradiction is fundamentally between the philosophical systems of Asia and the economic system of capitalism – a conflict between two modes of thought […]. You might say captitalism is about 'construction', while Asian philosophy is about 'destruction.' – Guan Xiao

Guan Xiao

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy Guan Xiao Studio

Photo: Mathilde Agius and Art Basel

Artist Guan Xiao Biography  

Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Chongqing, China) has held solo exhibitions at Bonner Kunstverein; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (both 2019); Kunsthalle Winterthur (2018); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2016); K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai and ICA, London (both 2016). Her work has also been exhibited at Start Museum, Shanghai (2024); Mudam Luxembourg (2023 and 2021); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2023); Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (both 2022); the 34th Bienial de São Paulo; the 58th Belgrade Biennale (both 2021); X Museum Triennial; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Sharjah Art Foundation (all 2020); Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach; Honolulu Biennial; Migros Museum, Zurich (all 2019); the 57th Venice Biennale; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (all 2017); 9th Berlin Biennale; ZKM, Karlsruhe (both 2016) and the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015). Her public art commissions include works for Skulpturenpark Köln (2020); Anyang Public Art Project (2019) and High Line, New York (2017). Guan Xiao lives and works in Beijing.

Publication: Kunsthalle Wien will publish an exhibition catalogue that will also be the first monograph on Guan Xiao. Published in English and German it includes new essays by Chelsea Qianxi Liu, curator at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing and Sarah Johanna Theurer, curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich alongside an extensive interview between the artist and Michelle Cotton, Artistic Director Kunsthalle Wien.

KUNSTHALLE WIEN 

Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

www.kunsthallewien.at

Ding Yi @ Lisson Gallery, London - 'The Road to Heaven' Exhibition

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven

Lisson Gallery, London

Through 22 November 2025

For his inaugural solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery and his first return to exhibit in London in over five years, renowned Chinese abstractionist Ding Yi presents a new body of work. This latest series is deeply informed by the history and cosmology of the Naxi people of Yunnan in southwestern China, offering a rich cultural and conceptual dimension to his distinctive visual language. In line with his larger corpus, the artist’s latest drawings and paintings employ a systematic iconography in the service of a layered, subjective response – a continuous act of translation rather than a fixed text.   

In 1988, while a student at Shanghai University, Ding Yi adopted the cross, either in the form of a ‘+’ or ‘x’ symbol, as a leitmotif. Initially arranging crosses in strict grids, he later developed complex geometric patterns in fluorescent colours, producing works that mirrored the architectural and economic explosion of Shanghai in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Since 2011, Ding Yi has shifted toward a broader perspective, exploring themes of the cosmos, nature, and the universe, gradually moving beyond the strict rationality of his earlier work toward a more emotive and intuitive sensibility. Following his 2022 solo exhibition in Tibet, he began to engage more deeply with specific cultural and geographic contexts, with recent works reflecting a turn inward—toward spiritual reflection and contemplative states.

In 2024, following three research visits to Yunnan and in-depth conversations with scholars and Dongba priests, Ding Yi studied and internalised the texts and beliefs of the Dongba religion—an ancient tradition blending animism and Tibetan Buddhism. This belief system is preserved through sacred manuscripts composed in a unique pictographic script – the most significant and visually striking being The Road to Heaven. Used in funerary rituals, the long scroll depicts the soul’s symbolic passage from the earthly realm to the afterlife, and lends its title to this exhibition.

Drawing from the scroll’s visual and spiritual resonance, Ding Yi created a group of works executed on coarse-fibred Dongba paper using acrylic and water-soluble coloured pencil. These compositions reinterpret The Road to Heaven through his signature cross motif. The drawing transposes the Dongba writing system into a sequence of intricate schemes, each composed from a dense array of crosses. In this fusion of Dongba cosmology and his distinctive abstraction, Ding Yi invites viewers to perceive two worlds at once—entwined yet distinct in sensibility. Featured in the exhibition is The Road to Heaven 2024-B17, a four-panel work on Dongba paper. Each panel alludes to the transmigration of the soul through allegorical topographies: Nine Black Mountains, The Underworld, The Natural World, and Heaven.

The exhibition also features a suite of horizontal-format works on Dongba paper, continuing his iconic Appearance of Crosses series. For Ding Yi, works on paper hold a vital place in his practice, serving as both experimentation and refinement. In these, tiny crosses applied in various colours form mosaic-like compositions that oscillate between microcosmic and macrocosmic resonance. Blocks of dense black hatching – inset with constellatory motifs – echo the starry skies that have featured in Ding Yi’s works for two decades. Elsewhere, streaming blue diagonals conjure the two fundamental elements of life,  according to the Naxi – ‘Qi’ (energy) and water, linking to the ‘Twenty-eight mansions’ of Naxi astrology: the nightly resting places of the moon.

A group of larger relief paintings, rendered in chiselled basswood, features tiered zigzags that evoke the sacred Hengduan mountains of Yunnan in the guise of psychedelic abstraction. Coloured diagonals offset the faint underlying grid, while bold geometry, as often in Ding Yi’s art, compresses a sense of the minute, the handmade and the contingent, reflected in the tiny carved compartments that constitute each painting.

Ding Yi defined the first two stages of his career in terms of ‘steadying’ (the cultivation of a formal language) and ‘overlooking’ (the application of that language to the rapidly evolving world around him). The third, ongoing stage is that of ‘looking up’ – of widening his horizons, both spatial and temporal, to the cosmos and its ancient conceptualisations. The mathematical construction of his works belies a deep interest in the idiosyncratic and irrational dimensions of human thought and cultural tradition. The cross itself – at once Modernist and pre-modern, personal and functional – encapsulates the beguiling duality of his art. As curator Cui Cancan has observed, the “Winding Path” of Ding Yi’s practice “has no terminus – it sways fiercely between the poles of locality and globalisation.” The series of work featured in this exhibition is also on view at Ding Yi: The Winding Path at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University, China, until 9 November 2025.

Artist Ding Yi

A leading figure in Chinese contemporary art, Ding Yi works across painting, sculpture, installation, and architecture. Since the late 1980s, his signature motif—the cross “+” and its variant “x”—has served as a symbol of structure, rationality, and a visual language exploring the essence of being. Trained in both art and design, Ding Yi began experimenting with abstraction in 1982. During his student years, he developed a strong conviction about how to paint and what kind of artist he would become. Rejecting the Expressionism and Surrealism then prevalent in China, he chose a rational path “free from ideology.” Profoundly influenced by Western artists such as Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella during the 1985 “New Wave” art movement, Ding Yi launched his iconic Appearance of Crosses series in 1988, aiming to create “an ultimate impression of abstraction”. At the time, he “designed” paintings resembling plans for fabrics or blankets, using rulers and tape to eliminate traces of hand gestures—rigorously precise compositions formed through the

repetition of the cross.

Ding Yi’s methodical structures are animated by vibrant, reflexively chosen colours, introducing an element of chance and tension into the work. Through colour and form, his paintings reflect on China’s rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, with visual motifs echoing QR codes and the sensory intensity of an information-driven society. Since 2010, Ding Yi has adopted a more expansive perspective in his examination of the world, integrating reflections on the broader human condition. His more recent works reveal greater luminosity and intensity, carrying a deeper emotional resonance.

Ding Yi was born in Shanghai in 1962, where he continues to live and work. He studied Design at the Shanghai Art & Design Academy (1980–1983), and later traditional Chinese painting at Shanghai University’s Fine Arts Department (1986–1990). His recent solo exhibitions include those at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University (2025); Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales (2025); Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne (2024), Paris and St. Moritz (2025); Château La Coste, Provence (2024); Ningbo Museum of Art and Huamao Museum of Art Education (2023); MOCAUP, Shenzhen (2023); Mojie Art Museum, Taiyuan (2023); TAG Art Museum, Qingdao (2022); Jebumgang Art Center, Lhasa (2022); Galería RGR, Mexico City (2022); ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2018) and Singapore (2022); Timothy Taylor, New York (2021) and London (2019); Long Museum, Chongqing (2020) and West Bund, Shanghai (2015); Nova Contemporary, Bangkok (2020); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2019); Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2018); Xi’an Art Museum (2017); and Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2016).

Ding Yi has exhibited extensively in major international group exhibitions at institutions such as The British Museum, London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Power Station of Art and MOCA Shanghai; SFMOMA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Mercedes-Benz Contemporary, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; MAXXI, Rome; UCCA, Beijing; and touring exhibitions in Bern, Hamburg, and Barcelona. He has also shown in biennales and triennales including the Venice Biennale (1993), Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993), Biennale of Sydney (1998), Yokohama Triennale (2001), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012), and Busan Biennale (2016). 

LISSON GALLERY

67 Lisson Street, London

www.lissongallery.com

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven

Lisson Gallery, London, 27 September – 1 November 2025

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

East Asian Art Rediscovered Treasures @ Cincinnati Art Museum

Rediscovered Treasures 

Cincinnati Art Museum

September 19, 2025 — January 18, 2026

This exhibition reveals the untold stories behind East Asian masterpieces long housed in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s (CAM) collection. Featuring approximately 60 objects—ranging from Japanese armor and Chinese scrolls to Korean lacquer—Rediscovered Treasures brings to light transformative discoveries made possible by decades of scholarship, archival research and conservation efforts. 

While many of the featured works entered the museum in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they remained un-accessioned or misidentified due to a lack of staff expertise in Asian art at the time. Since 2002, when the museum formally established its Asian art department, ongoing research led by Hou-mei Sung, PhD, Curator of East Asian Art, has dramatically improved the understanding of these objects. Their rediscovery has not only reframed the museum’s collection, but has also illuminated Cincinnati’s early cultural ties to East Asia.

Among the exhibition’s highlights are three exceptional works: the fan-favorite Japanese bronze “magic mirror,” which reveals an image of Amida Buddha under special lighting, making CAM one of the few museums in the world to house such an object; a Qing dynasty portrait of a court lady, identified through research as an imperial portrait of Lady Nian, possibly painted by the Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione; and a Meiji period sumo wrestler’s embroidered apron, recently linked to the tragic career of Otokoyama Osuke, a promising young wrestler immortalized in a ukiyo-e print by Utagawa Kuniaki II. Each piece offers a unique story of rediscovery that enriches the understanding of East Asian art and culture.

“This exhibition is both a reflection of CAM’s mission to preserve and interpret cultural heritage and a celebration of the exciting process of rediscovery,” said Hou-mei Sung. “Many of these works, once overlooked or mislabeled, now tell vibrant stories of art, of individual lives, and of historical connections that extend far beyond Cincinnati.”

The exhibition is organized in three thematic sections. Uncovering Hidden Gems spotlights artworks recovered from storage and newly identified, including Japanese scrolls linked to Cincinnati artist Robert Frederick Blum and samurai armor tied to CAM’s early supporters and a trailblazing Japanese doctor. Revealing Identities feature reclassified works with newly attributed artists, corrected origins and uncovered meanings. Preserving Legacies highlights the scientific and technical efforts behind preserving these treasures, with insights from CAM conservators Cecile Mear and Kelly Rectenwald.

CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM

Thomas R. Schiff galleries (234 and 235)

953 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45202

www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org

The Way of Nature: Art from Japan, China, and Korea @ Baltimore Museum of Art

The Way of Nature

Art from Japan, China, and Korea

Baltimore Museum of Art

September 21, 2025 - March 8, 2026

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presents The Way of Nature: Art from Japan, China, and Korea, which draws on the museum’s extensive holdings to consider the importance of nature in East Asian cultures. The exhibition features more than 40 objects, from magnificent ink drawings to beautifully crafted stoneware and poignant contemporary photographs and prints. Collectively, the works reflect on nature as a vital source of creative inspiration and spiritual connection and consider human existence within the complexity of the vast natural world across centuries and into the present day. The Way of Nature: Art from Japan, China, and Korea is part of the BMA’s Turn Again to the Earth initiative, which explores the relationships between art and the environment.

“The Way of Nature offers an insightful look at the intertwining roots of artistic expression and the experience of the natural world through vibrant works from the BMA’s Asian art collection. It’s an exciting opportunity to see objects on view for the first time, or in a long time, through a lens that is both accessible and meaningful, as many of us seek connection through and to nature,” said Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “As the BMA focuses on expanding its collection with the work of artists from around the globe, we are excited to continue to share more of our holdings, and the stories they contain, with our community.”

The Way of Nature is organized around four overarching themes that engage with elemental aspects of the natural world and human intervention within it. The exhibition opens with a section that examines depictions, interpretations, and connections to the qualities of air, water, and stone. Among the highlights is a handmade Fireman's Coat (hikeshi banten) with Hawk and Waves (Japan, early- to mid-20th century) by an unidentified artist. The intricately sewn object depicts a hawk soaring above turbulent waves, suggesting that the firefighter who chose the design sought the protective powers of water, strength, and keen vision. During a fire, the beautiful imagery would have been worn on the interior, only to be revealed once the fire was extinguished. The section also includes works such as the evocative ink drawing Water and Mountain Landscape (China, 1955) by the artist Huang Junbi and the densely decorated wood and jade sculpture Miniature Mountain with Longevity Motifs (China, late 18th - early 19th century) by an unidentified artist. 

The second section explores the significance of the changing seasons as visual indicators of nature’s transformative power, whether in the experience of wild terrain or in meticulously tended gardens. Across East Asia, emblems of the seasons, such as plums for the spring and chrysanthemums for the fall, are both often shared within communities and widely referenced in art. A case in this section includes a range of objects featuring plum blossoms, such as the hanging scroll Plum Branch and Full Moon (Japan, 1905-1915) by Kamisaka Sekka and the stoneware Bowl Decorated with Plum Branch and Crescent Moon (China, 13th century) by an unidentified artist. The section also includes a stunning Buddhist Priest's Robe (Kesa) in Karaori with Floral Designs (Japan, 1750-1868) by an unidentified artist.

The Way of Nature continues with works that capture human intrusion into the natural realm, as artists reveal humanity’s environmental impact through both imagery of calamitous events and in more subtle and ambiguous scenes. In his series Between Mountains and Water (2014–2017), Chinese artist Zhang Kechun examined the effects of human activities on the landscape in Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, while Japanese artist Leiko Shiga documented the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the poignant photo series Rasen Kaigan. The exhibition concludes with consideration of the spiritual transcendence that can be found in nature. This final section is anchored by the eight-panel screen Ten Symbols of Long Life (Korea, mid- to late 19th century) by an unidentified artist. The complex screen incorporates eight separate paintings to convey a wish for longevity, as embodied through such symbols as cranes, bamboo, water, and sun.

The Way of Nature: Art from Japan, China, and Korea is curated by Frances Klapthor, BMA Associate Curator of Asian Art.

BMA - BALTIMORE ART MUSEUM 

10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218

artbma.org

Li Hei Di @ Pace Gallery, Hong Kong - "Tongues of Flare" Exhibition

Li Hei Di: Tongues of Flare

Pace Gallery, Hong Kong

May 29 – August 29, 2025

LI HEI DI 

Gapes at the vanity of toil, 2025

© Li Hei Di, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Pace presents Tongues of Flare, an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by LI HEI DI, at its Hong Kong gallery. This presentation marks Li’s first solo show with Pace since they joined the gallery’s program in 2024. Following its run at Pace in Hong Kong, Tongues of Flare will travel to the Pond Society during Shanghai Art Week in the fall.

Born in Shenyang, China in 1997, Li, who currently lives and works in London, is known for their explorations of human embodiment, displacement, and intimacy in luminous paintings that blend abstraction and figuration. In their vibrant, dreamlike canvases—where ghostly, translucent bodies and body parts pulsate in and out of view amid abstract forms and washes of color—Li embeds latent narratives about gender, repressed and fulfilled desire, and emotional fluidity for viewers to uncover and decipher. Primarily a painter, they also work across sculpture and performance, mediums that complement their otherworldly canvases.

Li’s work has figured in recent group exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield in the United Kingdom, The Warehouse in Dallas, Le Consortium in Dijon, France, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and Marquez Art Projects in Miami, as well as the 2023 X Museum Triennial in Beijing. They are represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio; the Hepworth Wakefield; the Long Museum in Shanghai; and the Yageo Foundation in Taiwan.

The artist’s exhibition at Pace in Hong Kong spotlights 11 new, never-before-exhibited paintings produced in 2025. Meditating on self-discovery and enactments of physical and spiritual transformation, these works imagine the body as an architecture of energies and feelings—a space where chaos, love, passion, and other phenomena converge and collide. These layered compositions, where spectral figures reveal and obscure themselves at different moments, speak to the complexities of selfhood and the conflicts between our internal selves and forces of the external world.

In this group of paintings, the most vulnerable and diaristic works that Li has created to date, the artist continues to use the natural world—in particular, movements and flows of water—as a metaphor for the evolutionary process of becoming one’s self. Wild abstractions rendered in saturated colors oscillate and undulate across their canvases with an oceanic rhythm, fluctuating with each motion of Li’s brush. As with their past bodies of work, they have also drawn inspiration from various literary sources—including Georges Bataille’s Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby—for their latest paintings. In these books—particularly in The Vegetarian, which tells the story of a woman who becomes increasingly convinced that she is turning into a plant—Li has uncovered new ideas about sexuality, monstrosity, and transfiguration that manifest in their new works. Each painting in this series can be understood as a seed for profound, liberating growth, revealing how change can emerge from the most hidden corners of the self.

A new wood sculpture by the artist is also on view in the exhibition. Depicting an abstracted body at repose within a cradle-like vessel, this work reflects the state of the physical body and the mind at night during sleep—sinking ever deeper into the shifting, unpredictable world of the unconscious. Presented together in Hong Kong, Li’s paintings and sculpture transport viewers to a realm where the boundaries between life and death, beauty and struggle, and imagination and reality are collapsed.

LI HEI DI (b. 1997, Shenyang, China) lives and works in London. The artist attended a one-year student exchange program in Ohio before studying at Idyllwild Arts in southern California. They received a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2020, and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2022. Their first one-artist exhibition was held at Linseed Projects, Shanghai (2022), followed by Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2023) and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2024). Recent group exhibitions including their work have been held at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong (2023); Centre of International Contemporary Art, Vancouver (2023); X Museum Triennial, Beijing (2023); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2024); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2024); GRIMM, New York (2024); and The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2025–2026). Their work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of

Art; and Yageo Foundation, Taipei, among others.

PACE HONG KONG

12/F, H Queen's, 80 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong

www.pacegallery.com

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Exhibition Overview

Monstrous Beauty 

A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

March 25 – August 17, 2025

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a major exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, which radically reimagine the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s pervasive fantasies of both the East and the exotic along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition interrogates the ways in which this mutable, fragile material that shaped European women’s identities in the past also led to the construction of abiding racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy removed from the present, Monstrous Beauty casts a critical glance at inherited attitudes toward the style, exploring how negative stereotypes can be reclaimed as terms of female empowerment.

“Monstrous Beauty examines the multifaceted legacy of chinoiserie in 18th-century Europe,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “By illuminating the beauty of the object and the power of this art form to reflect, distort, and dictate the ways in which women's identities have been shaped and perceived across time, this thought-provoking exhibition invites viewers to engage with the past in new ways."

Iris Moon, Associate Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met, said, “Monstrous Beauty is both a story of enchantment and a necessary unraveling of harmful myths from the past—myths about the exotic—that have a hold over the present. It is time to retell the history of chinoiserie.”

Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works, from 16th-century European works to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates how chinoiserie ornament actively constructed cross-cultural ideas of female desire and agency. Much sought after as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East in the 1700s, porcelain accumulated a variety of associations over the course of its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a charged metaphor for women.

Contemporary works by Asian and Asian American women artists counteract chinoiserie’s stereotypes of exoticism by reclaiming the monstrous as a source of artistic possibility. The exhibition’s central atrium draws viewers in with an installation of Yeesookyung’s porcelain vessels, which feature broken shards mended and turned into dazzling monsters using the kintsugi repair method. Viewers themselves form an active part of the exhibition, joining the conversation between works from the past and pieces by contemporary artists, including a new commissioned work by Patty Chang. Abyssal is a full-size massage table made of raw, unglazed porcelain punctured by holes. After the exhibition closes, the table will be sunk in the Pacific Ocean. Instead of a sturdy horizontal support for a passive body, Patty Chang’s massage table is reimagined as an uncanny object with orifices. Patty Chang writes, “The holes put the body in doubt.” Raising questions about who or what we choose to see, the work recalls the unseen labor of Asian women spa workers, such as the six women killed during the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. Abyssal is also about the possibility of afterlives, regeneration, and transformation. Underwater, the table will serve as a deposit for growing coral.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie: Exhibition Overview

Through a lens of curiosity and critique, porcelain reemerges here as a politically charged material that changed women’s lives. Five thematic sections introduce a mix of unexpected protagonists into the story of porcelain: queens, mothers, monsters, starlets, shoppers, and cyborgs. The style’s inventive language gave voice to novel tastes and identities, but also created lasting stereotypes that are difficult to break. The works of contemporary Asian and Asian American women artists are strategically positioned throughout the five thematic sections to rupture the illusion of a seamless continuity between past and present.

The exhibition begins with porcelain’s arrival in Europe via maritime trade. Porcelain appeared as strange and marvelous, when blue-and-white plates from Asia began arriving by sea in the 16th century. Merchants used porcelain from China as ballast, its weight offering ships stability in rough seas, before realizing they could sell it to eager consumers. Soon, shiploads of porcelain were being auctioned off in Europe by the late 1600s, even as anxieties around shipwrecks, warfare, and colonial violence surfaced obliquely in monstrous decorative motifs.

The next section explores how Mary II, Queen of England, developed an obsession with Asian ceramics in the late 1600s, giving birth to a taste for chinoiserie that influenced generations of women collectors in Europe. Mary’s main role as queen of England was to birth an heir. Instead, she gave birth to a taste for porcelain, which functioned as a surrogate body, a way to reproduce her presence by filling residences with bright ceramics, textiles, and lacquer panels. This feminine, personal take on chinoiserie contrasted with the French monarchy’s uses of the exotic to assert absolutist power.

Tea became ingrained in European culture, and the following section explores how this exotic beverage was turned into a potent symbol of civility that set Europe apart from the “savage” territories it exploited as well as the women who were in charge of cultivating a world of politeness in the home. Porcelain objects gained strong associations with women at a moment when public debates aired collective anxieties around their growing voices as consumers, tastemakers, and citizens.

Through the porcelain figurines that proliferated in 18th-century Europe, porcelain shaped notions of womanhood in unexpected ways. A shifting cast of goddesses, mothers, monsters, and performers, often clothed in gaudy costumes and adopting exaggerated poses, appeared. A starting point for later stereotypes surrounding the Asian woman, these figurines also put pressure on the fixed European vision of womanhood. These small, toylike objects paired with the period’s dazzling painted export mirrors serve as vehicles for reflecting on women’s self-perceptions—on how they wanted to see themselves versus the images imposed on them.

The exhibition closes with the long afterlives of chinoiserie into the 20th century and beyond. This was a period when modern Asian women directly grappled with the stereotypes created by the legacy of a historical style that conflated Asian femininity with traditional luxury objects and European consumption. The American imagination reshaped the style through film and photography. Like porcelain, these media provided a glossy substrate upon which fantasy images of the Asian woman could be projected and reproduced, and also contested.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie is curated by Iris Moon, Associate Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition:

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Author: Iris Moon

256 pages, 172 illustrations

Paperback, 7 1/4" x 10 1/2"

ISBN: 9781588397928

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

www.metmuseum.org

Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC & Shanghai Museum

Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

February 28 – September 28, 2025

Shanghai Museum 

November 12, 2025 – March 16, 2026

Incense burner in the form of a goose, China, 

Ming dynasty (1368–1644), early 15th century. Bronze

H. 14 1/2 in. (36.8 cm); W. 18 3/4 in. (47 6 cm)

Purchase, The Vincent Astor Foundation Gift, 2020 - 2020.335a, b

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Water dropper in the form of a rhinoceros

China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 15th century, Bronze

H. 2 1/8 in (5.4 cm); W. 5 in. (12.7 cm); D. 1 7/8 in. (4.8 cm)  

Purchase, The Vincent Astor Foundation Gift, 2015 - 2015.294

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Taihe" bell, note "Jiazhong"

China, Song dynasty (960–1279), ca. 1105, reinscribed ca. 1174

Bronze, H. 9 in. (22.8 cm)

Courtesy of the Palace Museum, Beijing

In ancient China, bronze vessels were emblems of ritual and power. A millennium later, in the period from 1100 to 1900, such vessels were rediscovered as embodiments of a long-lost golden age that was worthy of study and emulation. This “return to the past” (fugu) was part of a widespread phenomenon across all the arts to reclaim the virtues of a classical tradition. An important aspect of this phenomenon was the revival of bronze casting as a major art form. Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 aims to be the most comprehensive study of Chinese bronzes during this period. This exhibition, co-organized by The Met and the Shanghai Museum, where it will open following its display in New York, presents the new aesthetic represented by these creative adaptations of the past, while exploring their cultural and political significance throughout China’s long history.

“While bronze as an art form has long held a significant role throughout China’s history, this exhibition explores an often-overlooked time period when a resurgence of craftsmanship and artistic achievements revitalized the medium,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Bringing together major loans from institutions in China alongside works from The Met collection, this exhibition offers viewers an important opportunity to better understand the lasting aesthetic and cultural impact of bronze objects.”

The exhibition is divided into five thematic and chronological sections that explicate over 200 works of art—an array of bronze vessels complemented by a selection of paintings, ceramics, jades, and other media. Some 100 pieces from The Met collection will be augmented by nearly 100 loans from major institutions in China, Japan, Korea, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States to present the most comprehensive narrative of the ongoing importance of bronzes as an art medium throughout China’s long history. Featured in the exhibition are around 60 loans from institutions in China, including major works such as a monumental 12th-century bell with imperial procession from the Liaoning Provincial Museum, documented ritual bronzes for Confucian temples from the Shanghai Museum, and luxury archaistic vessels made in the 18th-century imperial workshop from the Palace Museum, Beijing.

Vase with archaistic design

China, Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), 14th century

Bronze, H. 15 1/2 in. (39.4 cm) ; Diam. 8 in. (20.3 cm); 

Diam. of rim 4 3/8 in. (11.1 cm); Diam. of foot 5 5/8 in. (14.3 cm) 

Purchase, Brooke Russell Astor Bequest, 2014 - 2014.449

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ritual vessel (xizun)

China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 

Qianlong mark and period (1736–95)

Bronze, H. 15 3/16 in. (38.6 cm);

Diam. 4 5/16 in. (11 cm); Wt. 36,4 lb (16.5 kg)

Courtesy of the Palace Museum, Beijing

The exhibition begins with the section “Reconstructing Ancient Rites,” which introduces how emperors and scholar-officials commissioned ritual bronzes from the 12th to the 16th century as part of an effort to restore and align themselves with antique ceremonies and rites. The exhibition continues with “Experimenting with Styles,” illustrating how the form, decoration, and function of ancient bronzes were creatively reinterpreted from the 13th to the 15th century. The next section, “Establishing New Standards,” explores further transformations in both the aesthetic and technical direction of bronze making from the 15th to the 17th century. The fourth section, “Living with Bronzes,” features a display in the Ming Furniture Room (Gallery 218) to demonstrate how bronzes were used in literati life from the 16th to the 19th century. The last section, “Harmonizing with Antiquity,” examines how the deep scholarly appreciation of archaic bronzes during the 18th and 19th centuries led to a final flourishing of bronze production.

Pengliang Lu, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art at The Met, said: “This exhibition attempts a long-overdue reevaluation of later Chinese bronzes by seeking to establish a reliable chronology of this art form across the last millennium of Chinese history. The exhibition will also distinguish outstanding works from lesser examples based on their artistic and cultural merits.”

This exhibition provides visitors with a captivating experience as they follow the shifting cultural roles and evolving canons of beauty represented in later bronzes.

Installation view of Recasting the Past: 

The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900, 

on view February 28 – September 28, 2025 

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Photo by Paul Lachenauer, courtesy of The Met

Installation view of Recasting the Past: 

The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900, 

on view February 28 – September 28, 2025 

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Photo by Paul Lachenauer, courtesy of The Met

Installation view of Recasting the Past: 

The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900, 

on view February 28 – September 28, 2025 

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Photo by Paul Lachenauer, courtesy of The Met

Later Chinese bronzes have long been stigmatized as poor imitations of ancient bronzes rather than being seen as fundamentally new creations with their own aesthetic and functional character. This exhibition redresses this misunderstanding by showcasing their artistic virtuosity, innovative creativity, and wide cultural impact. Through archaeologically recovered examples and cross-medium comparisons to a wide range of objects, the exhibition demonstrates the ongoing importance and influence of bronzes as well as how they inspired the form and function of works in other media.

Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 is curated by Pengliang Lu, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. A beautiful and very interesting book!

Recasting the Past

The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100-1900

by Pengliang Lu

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Distributed by Yale University Press

304 pages, 9.50 x 11.20 in, 300 color illus.

Hardcover, 9781588397904, 15 April 2025

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 209-218

www.metmuseum.org

SHANGHAI MUSEUM

www.shanghaimuseum.net

Artist Huong Dodinh @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Transcendence" Exhibition

Huong Dodinh: TRANSCENDENCE 

Pace Gallery, New York

May 3 – June 15, 2024 

HUONG DODINH 

Sans titre, 1990 

© Huong Dodinh, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new and historic works by HUONG DODINH at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Titled TRANSCENDENCE, the show, which marks the artist’s first- ever solo presentation in the US, brings together paintings and works on paper she has created over the course of her career, from the 1960s to the present day. TRANSCENDENCE is accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing, which will be released during the exhibition.

Huong Dodinh was born in Soc Trang, Vietnam in 1945. Forced to flee the country, her family sought refuge in Paris in 1953 after the outbreak of the First Indochina War. Huong Dodinh has lived and worked in the French capital ever since, cultivating a solitary life in service of her artistic pursuits. Insulating herself from art market trends, she has maintained a commitment to authenticity, purity, contemplation, and truth in her work since she began painting in the 1960s.

Over the last six decades, Huong Dodinh has devoted her practice to three central tenets—light, density, and transparency—through which she explores the fluidity of line, form, and negative space. By adopting a private and intensely regimented lifestyle, the artist has developed a distinctive way of making that blurs the boundaries between art and the everyday. Working alone and without any assistants in her Paris atelier, Huong Dodinh takes personal ownership over every step in her process, from sourcing mineral powders for her pigments in Provence to mounting her canvases and applying her paint. Creating her own pigments and organic binders by hand, Huong Dodinh applies thin layers of paint multiple times to forge transparent yet dense surfaces. Through her use of natural materials, she produces vibrant visual effects through absorptions and reflections of light in her elegant, minimalist compositions.

For the opening of her exhibition at Pace—which marks her second solo presentation with the gallery, following her show in Seoul last year—the artist travels to New York for the first time in her life. Holistically, the nearly 30 paintings and works on paper that figure in Huong Dodinh’s debut New York exhibition speak to her longstanding interest in conveying ideas about silence, light, and pure feeling through a language of abstraction.

TRANSCENDENCE begins with a rare figurative scene that the artist made in 1966. Rendered in pastel, La Neige depicts, as its title suggests, a landscape of snow-covered houses and streets. Huong Dodinh encountered snow for the first time when she emigrated from Vietnam to France, and, with this early composition, she explored her relationship to her new natural environment. In works from the following decades, when she leaned increasingly toward total abstraction, the artist continued to meditate on the ways that organic lines and shapes can reflect and represent the wonders of the natural world. Through her work, Duhong Dodinh strives to harmonize relationships and engage in a meaningful exchange with the world around her. As she has said, "Art is a process of opening oneself to others." Recent exhibitions by the artist include her 2021 retrospective at the Guimet Museum in Paris and her solo presentation at the Museo Correr in Venice during the 2022 Venice Biennale.

HUONG DODINH (b. 1945, Vietnam) was born in 1945 in Soc Trang, in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Duong Dodinh and her family were forced to flee their war torn home in 1953 and sought refuge in Paris, where the artist continues to live and work today. At a boarding school in Rambouillet, Dodinh witnessed snow for the first time, marveling at the blending of land and sky. She calls this luminescent scene her artistic “epiphany” and it continues to inspire her painting. Duong Dodinh studied at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1965 to 1969, completing courses in a wide array of disciplines including engraving, lithography, frescoes, painting, and architecture. During this time, Huong Dodinh was deeply affected by the violence of the Vietnam War and the uprisings of May 1968. After a three-year break, Huong Dodinh was able to return to her artistic practice with a newfound sense of freedom. In the decades that followed, Huong Dodinh dedicated herself to painting, occasionally exhibiting in Paris and often encountering fellow artists based in France such as Peter Matisse, Joan Mitchell, and Lisa de Kooning.

 

Duong Dodinh is the recipient of several important awards and distinctions including, 1st Prize at the International Grand Prize for Painting in Cannes (1981), the Silver Cross of Merit and French Dedication (1996), and the Vice President Maison de la Culture d'Asie Orientale (1997). She presented a solo exhibition in 2021 at the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, and has participated in group presentations at FRAC de Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, as well as the major contemporary art exhibition Triptyque in Angers.

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Artist Xie Nanxing @ Capitain Petzel, Berlin - "f o r a d e c a s a" Exhibition

Xie Nanxing: f o r a d e c a s a

Capitain Petzel, Berlin

25 April - 1 June 2024

Capitain Petzel presents f o r a d e c a s a, a solo exhibition of paintings by Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, Chongqing, lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu).

f o r a d e c a s a is comprised of eight paintings which represent a complete body of work. The title, an abstraction of the Portuguese “fora de casa”, as in “jogo fora de casa” – the away game – reveals this series’ origins: while visiting Lisbon Xie Nanxing came across a notebook, the vibrant green pages of which were each marked with the lines of a football pitch. Perhaps a fun gift for the child whose bedroom walls are adorned with posters of footballers, or possibly a serious tool for the tactician for whom each match is an obsession. The markings of the football pitch – rendered most clearly against a comparable green background in f o r a d e c a s a # 1 – became the basis for this group of paintings, both as a loosely interpreted formal structure for each new work and as a catalyst for their content.

Football is a paradox. So trivial yet so serious. It is not a matter of life and death, the great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly reputedly said: it is much more important than that. Or perhaps it is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, said Gary Lineker, the Germans always win. Painting is also a paradox, at least for Xie Nanxing. It is not the truth, he has said, but neither is it just a game. It is “more like a game that is close to the truth, or rather a truth-mimicking game”. He has expressed a “mistrust” of painting, and yet he has spent the last three decades engaged in a deliberate and meticulous studio painting practice.

Nowhere is Xie Nanxing’s ambivalent, conflictual attitude towards painting more apparent than in the “canvas print” technique which he has often returned to over the last fifteen years and which he uses in several of these paintings. f o r a d e c a s a # 8, for example, is ostensibly the most abstract of the paintings in the exhibition – we see a central green circle, perhaps a centre circle, overlaid with faintly stippled polychromatic marks. As we continue to look, traces of figures begin to emerge to the left of the canvas, while to the right we see a harder-edged form and a rich patch of green reminiscent of the first painting in this series. These marks are in fact the literal traces of another painting which was made on an unstretched canvas that had been laid over the top of the surface we now see, such that some of the paint seeped through. That painting was then removed, never to be shown, and we are left with its “shadows” – evidence of painting having taken place.

And yet in this same series Xie Nanxing also embraces sheer painterly bravura, albeit interrupted by football scorecards, while in overtly citing Goya’s The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (and not for the first time) Xie embraces his work’s place in a longer tradition of painting. Some paintings suggest abstraction, but others are uncharacteristically direct in their figuration. A football match can be tense and tactical, but it can also be an explosion of excitement. Catenaccio or heavy metal football. “Xie Nanxing’s paintings cannot be cast in the camps of either aestheticized objecthood or conceptual dematerialization”, the curator and art historian Ruth Noack has acutely observed, “they hover firmly in between”. 

CAPITAIN PETZEL

Karl Marx Alle 45 - 10178 Berlin

www.capitainpetzel.de

Chen Ke: New Year greeting card for Kering

Kering invites prominent contemporary Chinese artist Chen Ke to celebrate Chinese New Year

Chen Ke, Dragon Boat 

Image Courtesy of Kering

In honor of the upcoming Chinese New Year in February 2024, Kering has invited Chen Ke, a prominent female contemporary Chinese artist, to collaborate on a crossover art project titled "Dragon Boat". The project empowers imagination and go beyond traditional cultural symbols, conveying a contemporary artistic touch to ring in a new year of prosperity.

Born in the 1970s, Chen Ke has witnessed the rapid development of China. In her creative career, she has skillfully intertwined Chinese traditional culture with Western culture. She typically uses the oil painting medium to evoke experiences and memories while signaling open-ended growth.

Her oil painting masterpiece "Dragon Boat" draws inspiration from the ancient Chinese legend of dragons. People endow this creature, derived from imagination, with free forms and personalities, embodying rich emotions. 

On the vast icy surface, a dragon boat with a non-traditional shape slowly approaches a little girl dressed in winter clothes. The narrative context originates from traditional Chinese roots, but takes a different path, full of whimsy. The dragon boat is not just a boat nor a traditional symbol – it represents living beings, nature, and the universe. The dialogue between the child and the dragon boat transcends language to speak to the heart. The artist has expressed hope and joy in a world of imagination, presenting a unique and unrestricted wish in the Year of the Dragon. 

Collaborating with Chinese artists on Lunar New Year campaigns has become a tradition for Kering: an important moment to pay homage to Chinese traditions with a contemporary twist. In 2023, the Group collaborated with contemporary Chinese painter Peng Wei, whose artwork That Year celebrated harmony of humans and nature via biodiversity protection. In 2022, Kering welcomed the year of the Tiger by commissioning contemporary calligrapher’s Xu Jing auspicious brushstroke. In 2020, papercut artist Wen Qiwen and her piece Gazing at the sky beyond the clouds presented a playful nod to Kering’s Chinese name “kaiyun”. The year before，Kering’s new year greetings saw another word play twist with artist Xu Bing’s innovative "English square character" calligraphy. These collaborations not only showcase Kering's support for art but also reflect its continuous pursuit of innovation and diversity.

In the upcoming Year of the Dragon, Kering and Chen Ke will present fascinating and excellent works of art. They will echo the Group’s signature mission, "Empowering Imagination", while aligning with Kering’s core concept of creativity and innovation, reflecting its core value of empowering women. This has long been supported by Kering’s Women In Motion program that shines a light on women’s contribution to culture and the arts. Earlier, Chen Ke was interviewed on the Kering Women In Motion official WeChat account, sharing her own creative vision.

In addition to the printed version of the artist's original artwork as a New Year greeting card, this crossover creative project also includes digital formats. Starting from January 23rd, Kering is also launching the "Kering Creative Relay" social challenge on its official Red account, inviting the public to participate in a New Year's wish campaign. 

Chen Ke Biography

Chen Ke, born in 1978 in Tongjiang, Sichuan province, currently lives and works in Beijing.She holds a master’s degree from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.

Chen Ke launched her career in Beijing after obtaining a BA from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2002 and an MFA in 2005 from the same faculty. Chen is among the generation witnessing the rapid development of China. Traditional Chinese culture and Western culture have intertwined throughout her growth and career.

In Chen’s early works, a fragile little girl was often depicted in a surrealistic background, struggling with a reversed reality, or wallowing in nostalgia in a lonely and innocent manner. Since 2012, Chen began to use the real figures in her photographic works as the object of description. From Frida to Monroe, she expressed her feelings in real life through the interpretation of these characters, especially the situation of women in society. And the experience of time and life.

In 2018, Chen set out on a new series, attempting to deal with the genuine feelings she has about her father. In these paintings, she managed to approach her personal experience and understanding of life in a more straightforward method. Through a series of mixed media paintings and installations inspired by the daily talk with the artist’s father, Chen discussed about youth, characteristic, family and aging in her solo exhibition The Real Deal is Talking with Dad at Yuz Museum (Shanghai, China).

In 2020, Chen debuts the Bauhaus Gal series. These portraits are based on the zeitgeist-charged archive photos of the Bauhaus. Chen prefers the classical conventions when delineating the faces of these pioneering young women of modern times. Immersed in their own world and in deep thought, they are completely oblivious of the gazes from the outside. While transforming into painting, these archive images undergo “physical implants” so that the painter can relive certain moments in life and recollect involuntary memories such as smell, light and touch, thereby reviving those black and white figures in these historical records. Her awareness of medium from years of painting practice helps her to establish a link between the ancient spirit and contemporary sentiments.

Chen Ke plots her art inside her own script, involving the medium of painting in the mutual generation of experiences and memories to endeavor an open-ended development. 

About Kering

A global Luxury group, Kering manages the development of a series of renowned Houses in Fashion, Leather Goods and Jewelry: Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Brioni, Boucheron, Pomellato, DoDo, Qeelin, Ginori 1735 as well as Kering Eyewear and Kering Beauté.

www.kering.com