「The Hermit's Gaze」Ye Henggui Solo Exhibition:

2025.09.18-2025.10.15

Exhibition Site

In an age where attention is the scarcest resource, let us, through Ye Henggui’s works, rediscover how to see, how to pause, and how to find the infinite in the simplest things. This is not merely an artistic experience but a practice of existence.Now, we invite you to step closer and accept this invitation. Let us follow the artist’s gaze, turn our attention to the neglected corners around us, and encounter the eternal within the seemingly ordinary "fragments."——Excerpt from the Curator's Preface「The Hermit's Gaze」

Exhibition Site

「The Hermit's Gaze」

Ye Henggui Solo Exhibition

2025.9.18-2025.10.15

Academic Chairr：Du Xiyun

Curator：Frankie

Concordia Art Gallery

Exhibition Site

On September 20th at 4 PM, the Concordia Art Gallery launched artist Ye Henggui's solo exhibition, "The Hermit's Gaze." The exhibition is curated by Frankie, with Du Xiyun serving as the academic advisor. In this era dominated by speed and efficiency, our gaze has become more fragmented than ever before. Each day, countless images flood across screens, stimulating our retinas yet seldom reaching the depths of our hearts. We have grown accustomed to glancing rather than gazing, to consuming rapidly rather than savoring. In the deluge of information, we find ourselves trapped in a "poverty of seeing"—the more we look, the less we truly perceive. It is within this contemporary context that Ye Henggui's artistic practice, characterized by its unique "hermit's gaze," offers a precious form of resistance and redemption. The exhibition will run until October 15th and will remain open during the National Day holiday.

Exhibition Site

「The Hermit's Gaze」

Opening ceremony scene

Opening Ceremony

Mr. Fan Yi, the curator, delivered a speech

The curation of Mr. Ye Henggui's exhibition originated from the vision and trust of Bao Yu from Common Art Center. Her encouragement led me to complete a profound practice transitioning from "seeing" to "interpreting," thereby reading the "poetics of the everyday" in Ye Henggui's art. Ye's paintings offer a highly revelatory philosophy of observation: he guides us to gaze intently at those often overlooked corners of daily life—a crossroads, a nook, a slice of melon. While formally serene, these images contain a profound power of "pause.

Exhibition Site

The artist does not merely depict the surface of things; rather, through the subtle orchestration of color, composition, and perspective, he reveals the temporality and contemplative space hidden beneath the ordinary. His gaze can be understood as a "hermit's perspective." In an accelerating society, we have become accustomed to functional, purpose-driven seeing, yet Ye Henggui defamiliarizes commonplace objects through his painting, restoring their overlooked aesthetic value and spiritual density.

Exhibition Site

Just like the Songzhuang intersection he depicts—where one can only turn left or right—that moment of enforced pause interrupts our inertia, prompting us to reexamine the relationship between ourselves and the world around us. Thus, this exhibition is an attempt to advocate an experience of "inward gazing." We seek to gently release art from its frames, allowing it to return to the unassuming rhythm of the everyday, yet still illuminate, at the right moment, the overlooked truths of our lives.

Mr. Ye Henggui, the artist, delivered a speech

Good afternoon, friends and teachers. I'd like to briefly share my artistic journey. In my creative practice, I oppose the superficiality, standardization, and symbolization of style, instead advocating for diversity in pictorial language to avoid falling into fixed schematics or habitual repetition. My work primarily reflects on superficial lifestyles, which is why I strive for richness and variation in both subject matter and form. This has been my core reflection on painting in recent years, and what continually fuels my creative drive. I hope to avoid the common parabolic trajectory of an artistic career—rising from immaturity to a peak, only to gradually decline thereafter.

Exhibition Site

An artist's life should be a marathon, not a sprint. Maintaining enduring creativity is both my ideal and the direction of my efforts. This philosophy directly shapes my current creative approach: in each painting, I strive to avoid any connection to the previous one. They exist as fragmented moments—a process of renewed experience. Every work represents a fresh start, and this mindset is crucial for an artist's growth and accumulation. My creative practice consistently revolves around clearly defined questions. It is this conscious inquiry that drives my understanding. From the overall character of my work, you may sense the issues I engage with, offering a pathway to interpreting my paintings.

Philosopher, critic, curator

Mr. Xia Kejun, a professor from the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Renmin University of China, delivered a speech

Ye Henggui's works construct a unique mode of "gaze." On a two-dimensional plane, he dissects space through color and, in turn, reconstructs color through spatial relationships, creating a visual dialectic. This technique disrupts the traditional balance of the picture plane; beneath an ostensibly tranquil still-life form lies a subtle sense of tilt and dynamic tension.

Exhibition Site

The core of his creative approach lies in the philosophy of "cutting"—not merely the physical sectioning of forms, but the opening up of visual perception. For instance, he cuts open fruit, presenting its internal cross-section from unconventional angles, thereby establishing a dialogue between sharp, defined shapes and soft, delicate textures. This act of cutting generates multiple spatial layers: while the picture plane tends towards flatness, each color block, through precise advances and recessions of hue and their juxtaposition, expands a rich spatial illusion within a limited depth.

Exhibition Site

Within a pure painterliness, Ye Henggui returns to an exploration of the fundamental relationship between color and space. He imbues color with sensory qualities—the sharp acidity of a lemon, the fresh sweetness of a melon—thus reaffirming, in the age of AI, the irreplaceable power of painting to convey embodied perception. His paintings defamiliarize everyday objects; through perspectives of "cutting" and "reassembling," they guide the viewer to re-examine the mundane with a calm, contemplative state of "regarding all things as equal."

Exhibition Site

This creative practice stems from the artist's innate serenity and his sustained, focused gaze upon objects. The exhibition showcases a rare quality in Ye Henggui's painting: the ability to establish order within imbalance and generate poetry from the ordinary, offering a vivid case study for Chinese contemporary painting that possesses both academic depth and perceptual richness.

Wu Wei Design, Design Director

Mr. Wu Wei, co-founder of Gonghe She, delivered a speech

Returning to the Concordia Art Gallery after three years, I was deeply struck by its evident growth and progress. Within the challenging ecology of contemporary art, the center's ability to maintain a consistent, stable, and dynamic exhibition program is truly admirable.

Exhibition Site

From a professional perspective, Mr. Ye Henggui's work demonstrates a remarkable capacity for spatial dialogue. His paintings create a kind of "breathable depth" on the wall—a visual profundity achieved through color and composition that not only enriches spatial layers but also imbues the environment with a distinctive rhythmic quality. This is the underlying reason his work is highly regarded within the design community. Curator Fan Yi excels at constructing a field through lifelike scenarios. In 798, an area often inclined toward conceptual expression, this exhibition remarkably presents a warm, tangible quality. Its value lies in its professional exhibition design, which vividly demonstrates the possibility of integrating art into daily life, offering collectors inspiration that transcends conventional perspectives.

Untitled, 80x60cm, Oil on Canvas, 2023

This practice resonates with current trends in art consumption, where artworks are increasingly becoming vehicles for emotional expression and lifestyle aesthetics, providing spiritual fulfillment to a new generation of collectors through empathetic experiences. I congratulate the successful opening of this exhibition, which not only showcases Mr. Ye Henggui's artistic achievements but also serves as an exemplary demonstration of the integration of art and daily life.

Ms. Bao Yu, co-founder of Concordia Art Gallery, delivered a speech

In the curation of Ye Henggui's second solo exhibition, we have invited Fan Yi to serve as the curator, aiming to break away from the traditional exhibition format centered purely on academic interpretation. We believe that art exhibitions should not stop at the "interpretation" of text but should instead shift toward achieving a "perceptible depth of understanding" through spatial narrative and visual language. With his keen insight into lifestyle, nuanced understanding of the artworks, and acute sensitivity to the relationships between space, material, and visual elements, Fan Yi is able to organically integrate Ye Henggui's paintings into diverse contexts, reconstructing the audience's pathways of perception and dimensions of experience.

Exhibition Site

Based on our two decades of practice in contemporary art (ten years in publishing and ten years in exhibitions), we firmly believe that the value of art lies not only in academic systems or market mechanisms, but more importantly in its ability to establish organic connections with space, life, and the viewer. Ye Henggui's creative practice consistently revolves around fragmented observations of daily life. His artistic vision is not confined by style or language, instead capturing and reconstructing fragments of reality from a free-flowing perspective. It is precisely this multi-dimensional, open mode of expression that is particularly suited for translation and extension through curatorial and design thinking. We are convinced that Ye Henggui is a significant painter worthy of sustained attention in the next ten to twenty years of Chinese contemporary art. His works not only evoke emotion but also offer a new logic of viewing—continually expanding the interpretive possibilities of painting within an aesthetic practice that refuses preset boundaries.

Exhibition Site

ABOUT CURATOR

Curator Fanyi

Fan Yi, a prominent figure long engaged in China's architectural and interior design fields, is recognized as one of the most influential designers today. Establishing Superposition OFFICE in Beijing, he subsequently set up offices in cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. The practice serves leading real estate developers, retailers, manufacturers, entrepreneurs, and discerning individuals, shaping buildings, commercial spaces, and private residences. Leveraging the unique advantage of integrated architectural and interior design, Superposition OFFICE balances human needs with spatial quality, construction with nature, creating numerous well-regarded commercial and residential environments. The office has received multiple domestic and international awards and has been widely acclaimed and featured by authoritative media. Fan Yi’s proposed design philosophy of “Synergism of Interstice and Realm” consistently guides the creative process of each project, laying a solid theoretical foundation for rational yet poetic spaces.

ABOUT ARTISTS

Artist Ye Henggui

Born in Ma'anshan, Anhui Province in 1962, Ye Henggui was admitted with outstanding grades to the Third Studio of the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in the 1980s for creative study. During his university years, his sketch "Female Nude" was selected for inclusion in the publication "Central Academy of Fine Arts: 60 Years of Sketching." In 1998, he enrolled in the CAFA postgraduate program for further and his graduation work in 2000 received the 'Wang Jialiang Award' and was collected by the CAFA Exhibition Hall, becoming the first abstract work ever collected by the hall. Ye Henggui is dedicated to lyrical everyday painting, eschewing overt themes and concepts to draw energy from the ordinary, and has created a substantial body of highly elegant works. Significant exhibitions include: the 2024 solo exhibition "Ye Henggui" at Platform China; the 2023 solo exhibition "Inspiring the Ordinary" at Common Art Center; the 2014 "Ye Henggui Works Exhibition" at Today Art Museum, Beijing; the 2008 "Re-creation" at Schoeni Gallery, Hong Kong; the 2000 "Ye Henggui Oil Painting Exhibition" at CAFA; and the 1996 "Ye Henggui Oil Painting Exhibition" at Hong Kong Arts Centre.

Group photo of guests at the opening ceremony

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Founded in 2015, Common Art Center is the first contemporary art gallery with a crowdfunding membership system in China. The Common Art Center is jointly initiated by experienced curators, art dealers, collectors and other professionals in the field. It is committed to providing professional collection solutions for contemporary art collectors with a new business model. The gallery takes "paper" as the medium and works of media as its main research and management direction, because of the importance of such works in the Chinese art system and the broad development prospect in the future. Using paper and folk art as the medium, the excellent artists make paper as a tool to resist its fate, allowing it to get rid of the veil of function and reveal its own artistic value.

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