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  The Traveller

  2022.5.28 - 2022.7.3

Artist: LAN Zhaoxing

Venue: D06, Middle 2nd St., 798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd, BJ

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Tong Gallery+Projects is honored to announce that the solo exhibition of artist LAN ZHAOXING The Traveller will be open from May 28th, 2022 to July 3rd, 2022, during which the artist's latest paintings and drawings will be presented. Look forward to seeing you there!

They walked slowly through a landscape. However, they can only walk slowly through the silent scenery of the night.

          ——Sleepwalker Herman Bloch 

This is the third solo exhibition held by LAN Zhaoxing in Tong Gallery + projects after "Wildfire" in 2017 and "Acadia" in 2019.

You can still find LAN Zhao's distinctive personal mark in his works. Season and nature, the mountains of her hometown, her beloved author or philosopher, the seclusion cabin symbolizing the spiritual habitat...These things are to her what mount San Victor is to Cezanne, are repeatedly depicted on the canvas tirelessly. 

However, different from the past exhibitions, the boundary between reality and illusion has become more blurred: the dog Maodou probes out of the window of LAN's studio, but outside the window is the shadow of a big tree 20 kilometers away - like a journey between dream and wake at dawn. If you want to wake up from it, you can only jump as Tomas Tranströmer said: “Skydiving from the dream”.

Five years later, LAN Zhaoxing is still in the wilderness - in her first solo exhibition of her life, she wrote: “I need to put myself into the wilderness of feelings." Now, she is still in it but more lonely. Her increasingly clean and concise picture seems to be a kind of "silent" in painting. During her three-year lonely walk, LAN often fell into a state of unconscious creation, which she called “a power": "As if it was asking me to draw like this but not like that." It's not so much LAN painting as the picture found her and forced her to show it. For artists, this is a lucky suffering.

LAN Zhaoxing is undoubtedly more freely. Deeper in the canvas is always her repeated reflection on herself at the philosophical level. You can also regard this exhibition as the echo and whisper of her constant inquiry alone in these more than 1000 days and nights, and always face her heart honestly. And this requires courage: in the increasingly noisy world, the lone Walker needs to take the risk advised by Zarathustra and prepare for the flame of a self immolation. And LAN was ready to expose her heart at any time——

"Bring your love and creativity into your loneliness my friend. Justice will be proved sooner or later. Bring my tears into your loneliness, how I love those who sacrifice to surpass themselves!”

(excerpt from Also sprach Zarathustra Nietzsche)