Exhibition View of "Lu Liang: Stalking", 2026, ESLITE GALLERY Beijing.
ESLITE GALLERY Beijing announces Lu Liang's solo exhibition "Stalking" is on view from April 18 to July 5, 2026. The exhibition takes its title from the spiritual premise of Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Stalker" (1979), evoking a process of slow entry and sustained perception. Through repeated depiction and long-term observation, the artist approaches reality amid flux and uncertainty, turning painting into a sustained inquiry that unfolds between experience, memory, and history.
Exhibition View of "Lu Liang: Stalking", 2026, ESLITE GALLERY Beijing.
Born in Shanghai in 1975, Lu Liang graduated from the Mural Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), where he received his MA degree. He is currently Professor and Master's Supervisor at No.3 Studio of CAFA's Oil Painting Department. Alongside his long-standing engagement in teaching, Lu Liang has continuously expanded the boundaries of figurative painting in his own practice. The works in this exhibition extend his ongoing exploration of "state of memory"—from suburban night roads and abandoned structures to vacant streets and urban peripheries. These settings are at once recognizable and imbued with a subtle sense of estrangement. Lu Liang emerges as a "stalker-like" observer: both immersed in and distanced from his surroundings, recording the minute shifts of the world with a gaze that is composed and incisive.
Exhibition View of "Lu Liang: Stalking", 2026, ESLITE GALLERY Beijing.
The exhibition unfolds along three interrelated trajectories. The first centers on urban experience grounded in the artist’s daily life, tracing the accretion and transformation of cities and their peripheries. The second draws with "Atomic City" as a historical site, pointing to collective experience and national narratives shaped by a specific era. The third engages on Lu Liang's encounters in the northwestern region of China, particularly Huatugou, focusing on the life conditions and visual memory of marginal industrial zones. Interwoven in the artist's observation and representation, these three strands fold into one another to construct a renewed sense of reality. As in Tarkovsky’s "Stalker", Lu Liang's practice unsettles the parallel structures of the past and the present, imagination and reality; within this newly configured reality, the past, the present, memory, imagination, and the real world converge within a shared space and time.
Lu Liang, Solo Rider in a Snowy Evening, 2020-2025, Oil on canvas, 205 x 280 cm.
"Solo Rider in a Snowy Evening" captures a fleeting moment of movement on a snowy night in Beijing. The rider advances along an empty, silent road, and the atmosphere suspended as if time itself had stalled. Snow on the ground reflects the dim glow of streetlights, casting a luminous haze across the night sky and heightening the sense of solitude and estrangement of the individual within the urban landscape.
Lu Liang, The Chinese Rider, 2022-2025，Oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm.
In "The Chinese Rider", a richly saturated red ground and elaborate floral patterns fill the canvas. The rider and motorcycle are rendered with a portrait-like presence: The flame motifs in red and white on the vehicle are bold and expressive, while the rider’s dark attire suggests restraint. This interplay of contrast and resonance foregrounds individuality and self-fashioning against an ornate backdrop.
Lu Liang, Huatugou 3, 2017, Oil on canvas, 60 x 90 cm.
Lu Liang, Huatugou 2, 2017, Oil on canvas, 60 x 90 cm.
In works depicting new towns such as Huatugou, Lu Liang conveys a more complex emotional tone: Futurity coexists with desolation, and optimism intertwines with melancholy, forming a distinctive fragment of China's ongoing industrialization. In the "Atomic City Series" (2018–2026), the artist turns to a once historically charged yet gradually forgotten site in western China, transforming it into a visual archive of time, memory, and modernity. Weathered walls, collapsing structures, and the slow return of nature together constitute a material trace of time itself.
Lu Liang, Room 2, 2019-2024, Oil on canvas, 280 x 205 cm.
Lu Liang, Big Space 8, 2023-2025, Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 cm
Lu Liang's works are not aimed at mere representation. Rather, they emphasize an internal logic of painting and the distillation of perception. Through subtraction and intensification, he maintains structural coherence within a high level of detail. This approach lends his work a precision akin to photography, while preserving the perceptual tension unique to painting.
About the Exhibition
Exhibition Period: 18 April - 5 July 2026
Venue: ESLITE GALLERY Beijing
Address: B06, No. 797 Rd., 798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd., Chaoyang Dist., Beijing City
Courtesy of ESLITE GALLERY Beijing, edited by CAFA ART INFO.
