Exhibitions

27 September 2025

17 October 2025

Unbearable Lightness

Lin Hongjun
Solo Exhibition

Heng Art Museum

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Hangzhou/New York Co-Exhibition

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Lin Hongjun Solo Exhibition

Curator: Dr John Francis Larner

Academic Assistance: New York Contemporary Art Centre

Hangzhou | Xima Gallery

Exhibition Period: 2023.12.23-1.10

Venue: Xima Gallery (Xitou Hengchuang Centre)

New York | MC gallery

Exhibition: 2024.3.10-4.10

Venue:549 West 52nd Street, Ground Floor and 8th Floor

(Between 10th and 11th Avenue)

INTRODUCTION

‘I often indulge in my own imagination, in this absolute vacuum, everything is clearly identifiable. Everything is vague and unknown again, between the seeming and the unseeming, levelling a point of imagination swimming in mysterious conjecture, searching for the seeming and the unseeming’

-[Dialogue / Uriu Town Gatekeeper]

All good art includes both abstract and surreal elements, just as it has both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and fantasy, conscious and subconscious, both sides of the artist's personality must come into play. Lin Hongjun belongs to the kind of unusually sensitive person, where things or landscapes that seem insignificant to most people may have a role to play. Sensibility is her tentacle to explore life, which can metamorphose into a song and transform into a song. Lurking beneath the overt styles, schools and theories of art, belonging to no ism, and defying criticism, is the artist's private state of mind, which is the realm of fantasies and desires, of dreams, haunting thoughts, secret needs and overt plans, intentions and paranoia.

The series ‘Linlin’ looks very abstract, many people can't understand the ‘emotion’ and ‘expression’ directly through the picture, but need to understand it at a deeper level, why did you adopt such an approach?

This series is named after my mother ‘Linlin’, the creation of the beginning of the opportunity is derived from the retired for many years idle mother wrote autobiographical novels, in helping her to sort out the information was the most representative of their generation and the sense of the picture of the experience of the most touched by the idea of doing this series of works, in the beginning of the work, at first I was At the beginning of my work, I used to use figurative methods to express some characters and scenes, such as Red Guards, Crosstalk, Going to the Countryside, Reform and Opening Up, Millenium, and the Internet. ..... Through each decade a time coordinate, connected is the trajectory of life changes, later I felt that this era is really very distant, and I can only through the tinted glass to think about and observe that era, that era's unreal, no longer focus on the clarity of its out-of-focus abstract isolation of fragmentation, and then reassembled to become a specific symbol of that era.

-Dialogue: The Gatekeepers of Wuyu Town

The Unbearable Lightness of Life Sculpture Installation

Multi-dimensional Creation: From Painting, Calligraphy to Sculpture

As we all know, throughout the history of human art, artists with truly unique creativity are often multi-talented and passionate, just like the familiar masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, who could cross various artistic disciplines and even enter into the field of science and invention, which is a kind of giftedness to perceive the human nature, to explore everything and to understand the world. In a sense, Lin Hongjun is such a creative artist. From painting, calligraphy, sculpture and installation, from two-dimensional world to three-dimensional world or even parallel world, she tries to express her unique view of the world by using different creative materials, different art forms and different art languages.

In ‘The Unbearable Lightness Of Being’, Lin Hongjun's sculpture and installation works, a young girl gazing into the distance longs for a bright future, but her eyes reveal a kind of unspeakable and shuddering melancholy, as she tries to spread her wings and fly, but is unable to do anything about it; life is so beautiful, yet so impermanent and fragile, this is the most important point in her work. Life is so beautiful, yet so impermanent and fragile, which is the fundamental situation of human beings, ‘the unbearable lightness of life’.

-Lu Wenhua/Art Headline

The expression on the face of Icarus, who had lost her wings, was frozen between ecstasy and unexpected despair, but her eyes showed an ineffable, shuddering melancholy, as she tried to spread her wings and fly, but was unable to do anything about it; life is so beautiful, yet so impermanent and fragile, and this is the fundamental situation of mankind, which is the ‘unbearable lightness of life’.

Lazy Spring Afternoon

The bright sense of light and the languid murmuring are a dissection of the young girl's youthful yet rich inner world, as well as a whispering and singing of the flowering season of life growth. A quiet and elegant tone lingers in the picture, Lin Hongjun uses his unique artistic perception and creativity to depict the rich texture of the characters with gentle ink and grey colours.

Law of the Jungle

Law of the Jungle’ is a unique contemporary graphic language that tries to capture the floating, expanding, redundant, panicking, hiding, hidden and dark places under the skin of social reality with an extremely sharp perspective. The colourful blossoms on the screen are created in a playful way, like a needle piercing the surface of this prosperous world.

Lin Yuan Narrative

The Shadow

Last night, my shadow turned on the light.

Under the orange light, I looked at his dark, slender figure and

‘I want to leave you.’ His flat face imprinted on the wall

With a flourish, he said, ‘Please don't stop me.

He slid gently to the floor and disappeared down the doorway into the room.

Please give me three more seconds

Please give me three more seconds, maybe the leaves will fall on my shoulder.

23:59:59

And you'll be poking your head out the window.

Please give me two more seconds. Maybe this time I'll be able to swing at that ball.

And the letter will be in my hands.

Two seconds. The black seconds stop on the axis of symmetry.

59 minutes to 61 seconds. The earth stood still for two seconds.

Looking up at the grey sky, I stood still.

With only one second left, I sat on a bench

At 23:59 and 62, I put on my funny costume

Followed the silver-white moonlight and flexed away

[Wooo Town] Series

The Realm of the Inorganic

‘Infused with antique colours and Japanese style, the small figures in the painting with books in their hands wander among birds, fish and animals.

A world full of warmth, calmness and the fragrance of books is extended, with extremely rich and delicate aesthetic details, which reveals the artist's gentle personal world and spreads out in front of us based on her daily life, a small inorganic realm escaping from the big world, which is the artist's expectation of keeping her spiritual home and ignoring the existence of the outside world.

It shows the state of an artist who, when returning to his or her spiritual hut, must remove all the outside world in order to ensure that his or her ego is not intruded upon.

- Prof Ichiro Sato, Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan ( SATO ICHIRO )