Exhibition View
Luke Gallery presents Long Summer, a summer group exhibition which brings together six artists whose practices have been shaped over many years through sustained and distinct forms of inquiry: Pei Yongmei, Wang Yuyang, Xu Qu, Yang Liming, You Jin, and Zhang Hui. These artists do not form a group that can be easily defined by a shared style or visual tendency. What connects them is something less immediate, but perhaps more essential: each has continued, over time, to return to a set of questions that has gradually deepened through practice. For some, this inquiry is rooted in bodily experience; for others, in generative systems, invisible structures, or the movement from outward observation into forms of interior perception.
Exhibition View
The title Long Summer suggests a kind of time that moves more slowly than the calendar. It is neither the vivid beginning of spring nor the clarity of autumn’s harvest, but a season of ongoing transformation. Things continue to grow, yet they have already moved beyond their first emergence. Everything is advancing, though nothing is rushing towards conclusion. Seen from the present, the title carries a further resonance. We have become accustomed to speed: images are produced and quickly replaced; opinions are formed and just as quickly overtaken; the art world continually renews its subjects, media, and aesthetic priorities. An artist’s development, however, rarely follows this rhythm. The most enduring practices are seldom built on a single moment of breakthrough. More often, they take shape through a long process of returning to the same question, while slowly changing the ways in which that question is approached.
Pei Yongmei, Spring Breeze, 2023. Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm.
The evolution of Pei Yongmei’s painting can perhaps be seen most clearly through the changing subjects that appear in her work. From her earlier attention to cities, public space, and contemporary urban life, she has gradually turned towards figures, plants, and the natural world. Yet her true concern has never been subject matter itself. Rather, painting has become a way of rethinking the relationship between human experience and the world. While the visible objects in her work continue to change, painting remains, for Pei, a mode of thought rather than simply a vehicle for expression.
Zhang Hui, Blind Steps, 2026. Acrylic on canvas, 205 x 155 cm.
Zhang Hui’s artistic practice emerged in the context of China’s Post-Sense Sensibility movement in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period marked by experimental approaches to the body, action, and the structures of lived perception. Since shifting his focus primarily to painting after 2006, Zhang has continued to examine the condition of human beings within reality. The subtle distances between figures, spaces, and gestures form a persistent thread in his work, allowing his paintings to remain suspended between the real and the imagined. Presented in this exhibition, Blind Steps extends his ongoing reflection on perception, movement, and the quiet uncertainty that accompanies the act of finding one’s way.
Wang Yuyang, Vortex 20250910, 2025. Oil and special pigments on canvas, 230 x 175 cm.
Over the past two decades, Wang Yuyang has developed one of the most sustained investigations in Chinese contemporary art into generative systems, technological reality, and posthuman modes of vision. Working across painting, installation, moving image, algorithmic production, and mechanical systems, Wang is less concerned with the diversity of media than with the construction of mechanisms capable of generating images through their own internal logic. Within such systems, art is no longer understood solely as the expression of the artist’s intention, but as a process shaped by rules, materials, data, and physical forces. The artist withdraws from the position of sole maker and instead sets the conditions under which an image may come into being. The painting Vortex 20250910, presented in this exhibition, exemplifies this approach. Through the interaction of specially formulated pigments, magnetic fields, gravity, and material processes, the image gradually takes form, making otherwise invisible forces visible.
Xu Qu, Totem DPRK 5000-2, 2015. Banknotes, iron and marble, 202 x 48 x 38 cm.
Xu Qu, by contrast, turns his attention to the invisible relationships that continue to shape reality. Moving fluidly between painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance, he has maintained a remarkably consistent conceptual framework. Whether in earlier projects that examine systems of value, or in recent works such as Maze (Dark Green / Yellow /Purple), Xu’s work is less concerned with individual social phenomena than with the hidden structures through which reality is organised.
You Jin, Chaotic Phases, 2026. Oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm.
For You Jin, artistic development resembles another kind of continuous growth. Beginning with the visual experience of the digital age, his work has gradually expanded into more complex relationships between neural networks, algorithmic logic, and natural systems. Architecture, plants, bodies, and floating forms connect and reorganise across the canvas, forming images without fixed centres or definitive endings. Rather than asking how technology enters painting, You Jin asks how our understanding of reality changes once images begin to evolve, interact, and generate new relations of their own.
Yang Liming, Red Script Series, 2017. Oil on canvas, 280 x 215 cm.
Yang Liming has consistently entrusted time to painting itself. Since returning to painting around the turn of the millennium, his work has become increasingly restrained and distilled. From earlier blues to later blacks and reds, and more recently to quieter fields of white, these changes do not represent shifts in style so much as the continued deepening of a single inquiry across different stages of life. For Yang, painting is never simply the completion of an image. It is a process of covering, pausing, revising, and rewriting—a gradual movement towards a form that always remains, in some sense, unfinished.
Seen together, the practices of these six artists are distinct, yet they share a rare affinity. Each has maintained a long and sustained artistic practice while living through different stages of Chinese contemporary art. Since the late 1990s, they have witnessed periods of market expansion as well as moments of cooling and adjustment; they have seen media change, discourses shift, and artistic priorities rise and recede. Yet none of them has repeatedly altered their language in response to the preferences of the moment. Their works continue to evolve, but the questions that first set their practices in motion have remained active, growing deeper and more complex over time. Like new branches extending from a tree year after year, the direction has not changed; time has simply allowed it to become broader. For Luke Gallery, Long Summer is also a statement of commitment. A gallery’s responsibility is not only to introduce artworks into the market, but to recognise and support artists who retain the ability to continue working over long periods of time, and who remain willing to respond to the questions that have truly shaped their practice. What ultimately endures is not the style of a particular moment, but the trajectory of a practice that continues to unfold.
About the Exhibition
Dates: July 18 – August 31, 2026
Venue: Luke Gallery
Artists: Pei yongmei, Wang Yuyang, Xu Qu, Yang Liming, You Jin, Zhang Hui
Courtesy of Luke Gallery.
