MANGROVEGALLERY is pleased to announce The House That He Built, an exhibition of the latest works by Yu Hang. The exhibition will be on view from June 21 to August 9, 2025.

If The House That Jack Built was a film about spiritual architecture, then Yu Hang’s paintings would be blueprints of the inner space of one’s mind.

What the artist builds is not merely a house, but an alternative world that could exist.

Unlike the oppressive architecture and unraveling order depicted in the film, Yu Hang’s ‘house’ appears as an extension of the interior world of imagination—spaces not located in cities, but hidden within the body, or tucked away in the folds of memory. He deconstructs space, with flowing brushstrokes, and with bold colors and erratic structures, he builds up “an unstable shelter.”

The house, built by the killer; the image, composed by the painter.

If “building a house” is often a symbol of control or power, Yu Hang takes a different path: he refuses to build standardised house, instead, choosing to construct only an image-shelter that resist both order and obedience. Each stroke opens up a path; each mark is an escape from order. In a space without rules and filled with only possibilities, we, too, are drawn into a surge of impulses—to break free, to venture into the unknown, and to inhabit the illusion of freedom.

In this exhibition, the tearing between colors and shapes is no longer just a part of visual composition, but becomes a projection of emotion; the movement of the brush is not merely a technical gesture, but a record of struggle and response—a trace of the artist navigating between intuition and logic.

Perhaps Yu Hang is not trying to build an “ideal house”, he simply keeps drawing those emotions destined to be uninhabitable – and it is in this uninhabitable place that we feel a sense of true freedom.