WU Haifeng: Fermata: Curated by WANG Yaoli

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the opening of Fermata, the first solo exhibition by artist WU Haifeng, on view from May 22 to June 18, 2026. Curated by WANG Yaoli, the exhibition presents more than twenty recent tempera-on-panel works by the artist. WU’s painting practice unfolds around questions of time, perception, and inward states of immersion. Through figures, spaces, botanical elements, and musical references, he constructs pictorial environments that are gradually formed through the slow and repetitive layering characteristic of tempera. This process gives rise to a restrained and quietly suspended visual structure. His works attend to the subtle circulation of emotion and consciousness within a temporality that resembles a state of suspension. Between reality, memory, and perception, WU’s paintings consistently maintain a subdued yet persistent internal tension.

The English title Fermata is derived from the musical notation indicating a sustained pause, in which a performance is prolonged without a clearly defined point of termination or resumption. This suspended temporality finds a subtle correspondence in the states of WU Haifeng’s figures: absorbed in solitude, gazing, playing, or contemplating, they appear to be situated in a moment that has not yet ended or fully begun. The Chinese title "Kong Chu Yu Yin (Empty Space, Residual Resonance)" further intensifies this structure of absence and echo, as if sound has not ceased but continues to reverberate and dissipate within an open interval.

Musicality runs throughout WU Haifeng’s recent practice. Instruments such as the piano, flute, and guitar function not only as pictorial elements but also as metaphors for temporal flow. He consistently reflects on the relationship between music and painting: the former is transient and evanescent, while the latter arrests time within spatial form. His attempt is therefore to translate auditory experience into painting, so that sound exists within the atmosphere and rhythm of the image even before it is heard. In Drifting in Stillness(2026), the sound produced by a flute gradually transforms into white plum blossoms, which expand and proliferate upon entering water; here, sound is translated into a visible trace, as if, once it leaves the body, it returns to the world in another form.

If sustained engagement with Western classical painting has enabled WU Haifeng to develop an understanding of structure, order, and a certain form of spiritualized seeing, then his re-engagement with his own cultural context has gradually brought forward another set of references—those of traditional Chinese aesthetics, including notions of “negative space,” “wandering perception,” and “borrowed scenery.” In contrast to the more centered and stable modes of viewing in Western painting, Chinese garden design and classical pictorial traditions emphasize shifting viewpoints, spatial concealment, and the gradual unfolding of perception in motion. This mode of seeing does not privilege a single focal point, but instead forms a psychological space produced through oscillation between stillness and movement. In WU’s work, these two visual traditions continuously interpenetrate: the structural logic of Western painting and the restrained, atmospheric sensibility of Eastern spatiality jointly operate within the pictorial field, producing both clarity of composition and a drifting rhythm of perception.

The visual logic of Jiangnan garden culture has become an important source in WU Haifeng’s construction of space. In Hare and Taihu Rock(2026), a female figure is partially concealed behind a Taihu stone, holding a bow and arrow, while the rabbit motif references the pictorial schema of Magpies and Hare (1061) by Northern Song painter CUI Bai. The work simultaneously retains the spatial principles of concealment, borrowed scenery, and openness characteristic of classical gardens, while integrating Western pictorial concerns such as light modeling and spatial depth. The Taihu stone thus functions not merely as a regional symbol, but as a medium situated between nature and artifice—connecting figures, vegetation, and space, and generating within the painting a subtle and shifting atmospheric flow.

This attention to spatial relations and psychological states also extends to WU Haifeng’s depictions of human figures. In In Between (2025), two women sit facing each other, yet are gently interrupted by a table and a floral arrangement; a gaze has already been established, but the relational structure remains unconfirmed. One figure, shown with her back to the viewer, holds a mask but has not yet put it on, suspending both authenticity and appearance, self and other, within an unresolved moment. This interest in psychological space and “unfinished temporality” becomes more complex in Descent (2026): the internal structure of a piano cuts diagonally across the composition, dividing the pictorial space into intersecting zones. A contemplative male figure, scattered sheets of paper, and a translucent female presence together construct a field that hovers between reality and the subconscious. WU renders the “arrival of the muse” in a line-drawing manner, making this moment of inspiration appear as a barely perceptible approach—emerging slowly within creative blockage and mental depletion. Dried branches, suspended geometric forms, and a preparatory sketch for Magpies and Hare (2026) maintain the work in a state of instability, as if an emotion is gradually accumulating but has not yet been fully articulated.

The slow and repetitive working process inherent to tempera has profoundly shaped WU Haifeng’s painterly language. Each layer of application does not erase previous marks; instead, pigments and brushstrokes compressed beneath the surface continue to re-emerge faintly from within the image. It is through this process that time is gradually sedimented into the painting itself. WU does not seek to construct a complete or definitive narrative. Rather, he invites viewers to linger within these slowly accumulated details, to encounter a temporality that diverges from everyday rhythm—like the faint vibration that remains in the air after sound has dissipated.