LINSEED is pleased to participate in the 10th edition of Paris Internationale, presenting “Crépuscule”, the solo of Paris-based Chinese artist FU Liang (b.1993, China), on view from 15-20 Oct 2024. Pervading Fu’s works is an abysmal, eccentric quality shifting between nature, myths, and the cosmos. It is as if nascency grows out of the ominous; light glistens in the abyss; fluid flows from the petrified in Fu’s work, which stirs up a series of perceptions, emotions, memories, and knowledge. A term for the transitional moment between day and night, light and darkness, and between the alternation of lives, crépuscule encapsulates Fu’s experiment and obsession with the transformation of materials as well as his exploration of themes of the passage of time and gradual change of life. A delicate balance between bravado brushwork and sfumato dominates Fu’s canvas where different representations of textures, together with shabby walls in the booth draped in silk satin, incentivize unease. Situated possibly in fogged grottos, Horizon soon recalls the archaic myths drawing analogies between woods and peaks and the corporeal presence of a higher spirit. Seemingly covered in the exorcising silk luster or cocooned by its fabric-like skin, the figure emerges and recedes, congregates and dissipates. Forms in transformation and materials from uncertainties stand at the heart of Fu’s work where the figural and the tactile are always rhetorical symbols. In Aggregation, though the figural hands can be easily understood as a moment caught up during a ritual, it is the intangible and elusive density that aggregates and proliferates. Symbolsin his work reject a linear iconographic interpretation: whereas the thistle appeals to the artist as a synthetic symbol of life and death in European religion and culture, the blue-glowing thistle with spines rubbing against the fragile skin of the eyes and mouth, piercing the fabric, is integral to the “cosmic nurseries.”

Hands are rhetorical in Fu’s works, yet numerous traces of the artist’s hand, who practices performing alchemy, lurk in the works. Shapes like chemical dissolution appear as plaguing the canvas yet merging perfectly with the vaporing smoke, from either combustion or frost, that shrouds the figure. The rich textures of flecks and veins derive from Fu’s priming with organic material—rabbit-skin glue and mineral pigments—in lieu of gesso. Fu devotes himself to experimenting with different raw materials like quartz in pigments, silica in glazes, and water and earth within which the intangible and elusive energy lurks. Extending his work beyond representation, Fu’s preoccupation with the transformation of materials is rooted in his rumination on the cycle of life in the form of transition that, instead of running its course, engenders the often overlooked existence and beauty.

In the artist’s recent exploration of ceramic and wax sculpture, Fu transforms the objects long out of use and abandoned into creature-like and fragile shapes and enlivens them with a sense of gentleness and warmth. Suspended between the happened and yet to happen, these works gesture towards life beyond knowledge and the perceptions flowing with the nature of the material and form. The yoke of horse collars is reshaped into a nurturing cocoon; carbonized barks resemble fish fins and tails. Underlying Ashes to Ashes, the Chinese proverbial line the artist read aloud, there lays the power of compassion that resurfaces the close affinity between an alchemist and a poet: “I see in winding-sheets of clouds A dear cadaver in its shroud, And there upon celestial strands, I raise huge tombs above the sands.”