Hu Changqiong: Mortal beings-Current exhibition-拾萬空间

Hu Changqiong: Mortal beings

Shijiazhuang

November 22, 2025 – February 1, 2026

Artist: Hu Changqiong

Exhibition: Mortal beings

Duration: November 22, 2025 – February 1, 2026

Opening: 10:00 AM, Saturday, November 22, 2025

Rather than offering a stylistic summary, the exhibition re-positions Hu’s twenty-year practice within a concrete and layered framework of Eastern thought. Through painting, he seeks to reveal, articulate, and quietly settle the contemporary condition of the “dustheart”—the human spirit pulled between opposing origins of experience.

In his early works, Hu drew deeply from structuralism. With a near-austere rationality—moonlight in its poise—he examined The Body, Vigil, and Datong Mountain. Their steady geometries and the cool, meticulous strata of tempera embody the temperament of “coldness”: a clear-eyed analysis of life’s forms and a disciplined construction of order.

In counterpoint, yet persistent throughout his practice, runs the thread of “warmth.” Emerging from his Hunan childhood and the vital energy embedded in funerary rites, this warmth is humid, intimate, and charged with decay and renewal. In works such as Soft in Life, Strong in Death, The Narrative of Mountain Spring and Dried Flowers, and In the Rain, brushwork loosens from its constraints and color glows through stillness. It is the dustheart responding to the invitation of warmth.

Hu does not choose between coldness and warmth. Instead, he continually places the creative self—the dustheart stretched between both forces—into their shared field of tension. His paintings become at once battleground and sanctuary. The muddy struggle of the Underfoot series and the difficult negotiations within Reconciliation both trace how a mortal being wrestles under the twin pressures of the cold moon and warm sun.

“Moon cold, sun warm — such forces temper a human life.”In Hu Changqiong’s paintings, this very process of tempering is transmuted into a solemn visual form. Through his distinct painterly “hand,” he offers a resting ground for the unspeakable states of mind that mark our time — those wavering between reason and emotion, order and turbulence, withdrawal and engagement.

Hu Changqiong was born in 1980 in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province. He received his Master’s degree from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. He now lives and works in Beijing. Hu’s practice centers on tempera painting, using pure mineral pigments combined with beeswax, casein, and egg-based binders. His early works examined the pessimistic conditions of human existence within ethical and social realities; later, he turned to painting from life through a self-imposed constraint—working strictly from the limited window views inside and outside his studio.

He has held solo exhibitions at the China National Academy of Arts (2023, 2020, 2013, Beijing), Shenzhen Art Museum (2023, Shenzhen), Jining Art Museum (2020, Jining), and ICI LABAS (2020, Beijing), among others. His works have been exhibited at the China National Academy of Arts (2022, Beijing), Tianjin Art Museum (2021, Tianjin), Galerie Francis Barlier (2019, Paris), Zhangzhou Art Museum (2018, Zhangzhou), the Water Cube (2017, Beijing), Zhuzhong Art Museum (2015, Beijing), the Himalayas Museum (2014, Shanghai), and other institutions.

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