Exhibition
Wu Li Forbidden Fruit
MANGROVEGALLERY, Shenzhen
2022.9.10-10.29
July 5th, 2025
As part of the Young Artist Series, HEM Art Museum is pleased to present The Daylight, a solo exhibition by Wu Li, opening on July 5, 2025. The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s recent paintings, offering a concentrated view of his ongoing exploration of painterly language and his introspective response to lived experience.
Now beyond the age of forty, Wu Li revisits the world he has journeyed through with a lighter and more fluid gaze. Success and failure, materiality, human bonds, and the physical body—once pressing realities—are now transformed and elevated through his brushwork. Known for his distinctive curving strokes, Wu’s earlier works often evoked explosive, feverish visions. Yet in The Daylight, the emotional tremors of past imagery have crystallised into a new rhythm—one that flows through mountains, clouds, wind, and rain.
The watercolor works featured in this exhibition embody Wu’s long-standing commitment to both the formal and spiritual dimensions of painting. From fiery clouds rendered in dense pigments to layers of translucent light and vapour, from carefully composed thickets and winding paths to trees and halos that hover with airy motion. Wu moves from restraint to intensity, from simplicity to complexity, constructing a supple, resonant visual space.
The Daylight continues Wu Li’s consistent painterly stance while revealing his increasingly independent position within the landscape of contemporary art. It is an exhibition rooted in painting, and ultimately returning to painting: as a question, a proposition, and a practice. In this dreamlike yet grounded series of images, viewers are invited to encounter the artist’s renewed inquiries into colour, language, and the conditions of being.
Date： 2025.07.05 - 2025.10.12
Location：HEM Art Museum, Foshan, China
Click here for more information
As part of the Young Artist Series, HEM Art Museum is pleased to present The Daylight, a solo exhibition by Wu Li, opening on July 5, 2025. The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s recent paintings, offering a concentrated view of his ongoing exploration of painterly language and his introspective response to lived experience.
Now beyond the age of forty, Wu Li revisits the world he has journeyed through with a lighter and more fluid gaze. Success and failure, materiality, human bonds, and the physical body—once pressing realities—are now transformed and elevated through his brushwork. Known for his distinctive curving strokes, Wu’s earlier works often evoked explosive, feverish visions. Yet in The Daylight, the emotional tremors of past imagery have crystallised into a new rhythm—one that flows through mountains, clouds, wind, and rain.
The watercolor works featured in this exhibition embody Wu’s long-standing commitment to both the formal and spiritual dimensions of painting. From fiery clouds rendered in dense pigments to layers of translucent light and vapour, from carefully composed thickets and winding paths to trees and halos that hover with airy motion. Wu moves from restraint to intensity, from simplicity to complexity, constructing a supple, resonant visual space.
The Daylight continues Wu Li’s consistent painterly stance while revealing his increasingly independent position within the landscape of contemporary art. It is an exhibition rooted in painting, and ultimately returning to painting: as a question, a proposition, and a practice. In this dreamlike yet grounded series of images, viewers are invited to encounter the artist’s renewed inquiries into colour, language, and the conditions of being.
Date： 2025.07.05 - 2025.10.12
Location：HEM Art Museum, Foshan, China
Click here for more information
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