Liu Chuan: VIOS
Beijing
11th July - 30th August 2026
Hunsand Space (Beijing) is pleased to present VIOS, a solo exhibition by Liu Chuan, opening on 11 July 2026. Following his solo exhibitions Lumbering (2023) and STEAL STEAL (2024), this marks the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery. Featuring a selection of works produced over the past two years, the exhibition explores the formation of the pictorial image through the language of second-hand imagery. Each of Liu Chuan’s solo exhibitions constitutes an investigation into the possibilities of painting.
Artist: Liu Chuan
The exhibition title, VIOS, is borrowed directly from the name of an automobile. This choice itself becomes a quintessential example of “second-hand reality”: a ready-made sign drawn from consumer culture is appropriated by the artist as the exhibition’s title. In his transformation of “second-hand reality,” Liu does not deliberately foreground technique; instead, he seeks to “make full use of painting in order to approach each precise expression.” His practice moves in recurring cycles, continuously “trying, questioning, and pushing forward” through self-reflection and responses to reality. His paintings “appear straightforward at first glance, yet possess a lingering force, with details gradually revealing themselves through sustained looking.” This quality is further developed in VIOS, where “loosened lines, liberated fields of color, images drawn from reality, and hard-edged commercial symbols coexist and intermingle.”
The notion of “second-hand reality” refers to the artist’s appropriation and transformation of ready-made images drawn from everyday visual materials, including news screenshots, commercial advertisements, and online imagery. These images are themselves already “second-hand” realities, filtered and encoded through various media. Liu Chuan’s practice is not one of simple reproduction or appropriation. Rather, through the medium of painting, he internalizes these images, transforming them into content that painting today can genuinely rely upon.
Liu Chuan, born in 1991 in Jilin, graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Traditional Chinese Painting Department of Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in 2013, and obtained a master's degree from the Printmaking Department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. He currently lives and works in Yanjiao, Hebei. Tracing over repeated traces, viewers can follow back to a creative scene that hovers on the edge of nonexistence, perpetually unfinished. In self-examination and feedback from reality, Liu Chuan maintains vigilance, constantly experimenting, doubting, and pushing forward, a process that loops endlessly. The reluctant sense of humor in his creations is a sugarcoating wrapped around a serious core, simply for ease of consumption. The surface of the image appears simple at first but possesses a lingering force. As one gazes deeper, details gradually come to light. Liu Chuan does not deliberately emphasize technique; instead, he tries to make full use of painting to approach each precise expression.