Exhibition View
Preface
There are practices that grow at their own pace, advancing and circling back along paths of sustained inquiry.
Ma Shuqing, Feng Yan, and Wang Guangle—each of these three artists works with a tenacity bordering on the obstinate, driven by an ongoing interrogation of art itself. Density and sparsity correspond to the expressive language they share; time and space form the dimensions they cultivate in common. Though their artistic paths diverge, they are united by a singular quality: allowing the value of art to emerge through sustained action.
Over decades of deep cultivation, each has forged a distinctive trajectory of language. Their practice possesses both a contemporary edge and a composure that only long immersion in time can refine. Against the backdrop of rapid social transformation, this quality is especially rare and precious.
Exhibition View
In just a few decades, China has traversed a developmental course that took the West nearly two hundred years—much has been swept away by new currents before it could settle. Among what was lost is the long absence of modernism in this land. Those fundamental tenets—artistic autonomy, the purity of the medium, the independent value of form—glimmered briefly but never had the chance to fully unfold before being overtaken by other movements. Yet it is precisely this that has preserved within abstract-leaning art a rare purity: unharnessed by immediate social concerns, unattached to narrative or symbol, it responds, through long years of self-refinement, to art's more fundamental questions.
The growth of abstract art in China need not be understood through the framework of global modernism. It does not emerge from a crisis of representation, but is instead rooted in the depths of these artists' individual practices. Abstraction, for them, is not a stylistic destination to be arrived at, but the residue left behind by action and thought after repeatedly breaking through the inertia of their own making.
Exhibition View
Ma Shuqing devotes himself to the ontology of art. Moving through series such as Superposition and Concavo-Convex, often working on several simultaneously, he allows pigment to become substance, giving voice to invisible time and space. Feng Yan's photography ranges from the figurative objects of everyday life, to the magnified textures of mountain stone, to the painterly deep grass of the Tang mausoleums, and onward to painterly expression. In his crossings and returns between media, he turns art itself into a process of development and revelation. Wang Guangle's core inquiry springs from a sustained meditation on life's fundamental questions. From the beam of light in Afternoon to the Terrazzo, he has, through enduring labor, made time itself the central concept of his work.
This exhibition draws a cross-section from the present moment, allowing three independent and resolute paths to pass through—each complete in itself, yet reflecting and illuminating one another. It is not a conclusion, but yet another fulcrum for growth. Independent artists, brought into dialogue, form a collective synergy that will continue to evolve into the future. Through this cross-section, we hope to convey to the viewer that, even today, there are still those who walk their own path with such focus and conviction. Growth has never ceased. Sustained perseverance is the simplest form of artistic vitality, coalescing with space and time into a transmission of pure thought and spirit.
Exhibition View
MA SHUQING: The Colour of Space and Time
"I believe in painting." Ma Shuqing speaks these words lightly, yet has spent decades living them out.
Along the sides of his works, layer upon layer of colour has solidified. Each stratum builds spatial depth while recording the passage of time—process taking on visible form through the alternation of hues.
Ma Shuqing does not always work on canvas. Wood, paper, resin—the materials change, but his approach to colour remains constant. Only when colour sheds the weight of imposed meaning and returns to its neutral material state does it gain true freedom.
This holds for the Superposition series, and also for Concavo-Convex, where painting gently breaks free of its two-dimensional limits. The Provence series transforms distant landscapes into colour and structure. Ma often speaks of "seeing through touch." Simply looking at the hollows and ridges of the surface, at how light falls upon it. When the mind stops speaking, the eyes begin truly to see.
In the studio, a work is never finished. He often does not know when a painting is complete, sometimes waiting months for a moment even he cannot predict. Even once hanging in the gallery, the paintings remain open to time.
Ma Shuqing, Untitled, 106×130cm, Acrylic on Canvas, 2026.
Ma Shuqing, Reminiscence of Provence 04-2025, 250×250cm, Acrylic on linen, 2025
Ma Shuqing, Untitled, 23-26cm×16 , Acrylic and mixed media on wood panel, 2026
Ma Shuqing, Untitled, 60×68cm, Acrylic and mixed media on wood, 2025-2026.
FENG YAN × MA SHUQING: Traces and Layers
Feng Yan: Development and Generation in Painting
Feng Yan's painting does not arise from within the internal evolution of painterly tradition. It is, rather, a "photographic translation" rooted in the experience of analogue film. Here, photography is understood not as a visual style, but as a mode of image generation defined by the negative, development, and the structure of reversal. The image is not produced instantly, but emerges gradually through material, time, and physical conditions.
Feng Yan introduces the principle of photographic development into his acrylic painting. With water, gravity, and pigment as generative conditions, he deliberately relinquishes full control over the picture plane, allowing the image to take shape between manual intervention and natural law. The bleached areas, reserves, and shifts between light and dark across the surface echo the reversed structure of the negative, turning painting into a process of continuous becoming.
From the photographic series Sides of Painting to Tang Mausoleum: Deep Grass, Feng Yan has consistently attended to how time acts upon matter, and how traces become images. When painting once again becomes the subject of the camera's gaze, he completes a crossing between media: the image is no longer merely a result, but a state of ongoing generation unfolding between time, material, and reality.
Feng Yan, Untitled 8625, 180×150cm, Acrylic on Canvas, 2015. 
Feng Yan, Untitled 8626, 180×150cm, Acrylic on Canvas, 2015.
Feng Yan, Untitled 8709, 180×150cm, Acrylic on Canvas, 2016.
Feng Yan, Untitled 8728, 180×150cm, Acrylic on Canvas, 2017.
WANG GUANGLE × FENG YAN: Chorus and Soliloquy
WANG GUANGLE: Abstraction in Growth
For Wang Guangle, art-making is a vessel for ideas.
In the Afternoon series, a shaft of sunlight fell across an interior, shifting with the hours. Slowly, he began to ask: how can time be made visible, and how does existence reveal itself through sustained action?
This inquiry unfolded across his successive bodies of work. In Terrazzo, what was once a background was brought to the fore. Through repeated rendering, he came to realise that time is not a subject to be depicted, but the very process of creation. In the Coffin Paint series, an ancient custom was transformed into a painterly method. The Untitled series moved from polychrome to monochrome, from image to texture—a steady reduction that drew the work ever closer to the material substance of time itself.
Within the making of each individual piece, he works within a rational framework, yet consciously relinquishes absolute control, allowing gravity, humidity, and time to conspire.
Every mark on the canvas is a moment in time. As these moments accumulate, painting becomes the natural outcome of an idea growing through time.
Wang Guangle, 250317, 140×180 cm, Acrylic on canvas, 2025.
Wang Guangle, 070309, 114×116cm, Acrylic on canvas, 2007.
Wang Guangle, Untitled No. 2 230725, 280×180 cm, Acrylic on canvas, 2023.
Wang Guangle, Untitled No.2 250307, 280×180 cm, Acrylic on canvas, 2025.
MA SHUQING × WANG GUANGLE: Resemblance and Divergence
About the Exhibition
Dates: 26 July - 6 September 2026
Venue: Gallery 3B, CAFA Art Museum
Courtesy of CAFA Art Museum, edited by CAFA ART INFO.
