ZHU Xinyu: World: Curated by WANG Yaoli

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the opening of World, a solo exhibition by artist ZHU Xinyu, running from June 27 to July 25, 2026. Curated by WANG Yaoli, the exhibition presents nearly twenty oil paintings on canvas, showcasing the artist’s ongoing exploration of everyday spaces, modes of perception, and the inherent language of painting itself. Over the years, ZHU Xinyu has developed his practice from observations of studios, pathways, window views, plants, and subtle elements within daily environments. Through processes of fragmentation, layering, and reconstruction, he continuously expands the relationships between color, structure, and surface texture within the image, gradually forming a distinctive visual language characterized by remarkable density and complexity. His paintings preserve the warmth of lived experience while simultaneously revealing a spatial condition suspended between perception, memory, and construction.

For ZHU Xinyu, painting has always been closely connected to the act of looking. He focuses on how the gaze moves between things, and how different experiences become intertwined within the image. Observing moments in everyday life that are repeatedly encountered yet easily overlooked has become an essential part of his artistic practice. These scenes from reality, after prolonged observation, are continuously distilled, compressed, and transformed, eventually becoming visual relationships within the painting. What has consistently drawn ZHU toward painting as a process of action and exploration is precisely this natural unfolding that originates from observation.

Compared with his earlier works, which emphasized the unfamiliarity of images and the tension generated through visual contrasts, ZHU Xinyu’s new works further deepen the internal process through which painting itself comes into being. Rather than relying on the juxtaposition of “absurd” images or the construction of surreal visual stimulation to establish tension, he now seeks a more complex yet enduring force within painting itself. Figures, animals, plants, interiors, and landscapes beyond windows continue to appear frequently in his compositions, but they no longer serve explicit narrative functions. Instead, they become essential elements in organizing the image's structure.

The notion of “density” provides an important entry point for understanding ZHU Xinyu’s practice. For the artist, density is not simply the accumulation of information, nor an increase in the quantity of details, but rather a continuous process of compressing the possibilities contained within an image. Compared with the clearer visual relationships of his earlier works, the new paintings possess a greater capacity for information and a higher visual “resolution”: color, structure, light, texture, and traces are repeatedly covered, altered, and reorganized through the use of brushes and palette knives. Within the limited space of the canvas, the viewer’s gaze cannot immediately reach the endpoint of the image, but instead continuously moves and lingers among different sections. This experience of looking, almost comparable to viewing an image with “high pixels,” allows the painting to unfold with a sustained richness and visual fulfillment.

A painting does not emerge according to a predetermined image in ZHU Xinyu’s practice; rather, it gradually takes shape through continuous experimentation and adjustment. When the image becomes too stable or falls into a habitual state, he deliberately introduces dissonant colors, structures, or gestures, disrupting the existing order in search of new possibilities. The numerous intermediate states left behind through processes of covering, erasing, modifying, and rebuilding are preserved as part of the painting itself. Seemingly accidental traces, obscured layers of color, and ambiguous spatial relationships collectively record the trajectory of the painting’s formation. Each work grows from unresolved questions left by previous works, finding new directions through constant adjustment, deviation, and transformation.

ZHU Xinyu consistently emphasizes the autonomy of painting as an independent medium. Points, lines, planes, colors, and textures constitute the language through which the meaning of the image itself is formed. He consciously reduces painting’s traditional reliance on volume, light, shadow, and spatial illusion. Through a restrained yet complex system of gray tones, reflective layers of color, and increasingly flattened structural relationships, he compresses three-dimensional experience back into the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Those colors that resist precise naming, together with surfaces that appear covered by a thin layer of frost, create the distinctive visual atmosphere of his works, allowing the image to remain suspended between revelation and concealment.This understanding of painting is also connected to his perception of the “world.” For ZHU Xinyu, the world is not a grand external object, but something constructed through countless specific and subtle experiences. The world is not defined by magnitude, but by multiplicity. Each individual is surrounded by their own forms of perception, memory, and emotion, through which they establish a personal coordinate system. Within his paintings, three perspectives coexist simultaneously: the objects depicted within the image, the artist at the moment of creation, and the viewer who later enters the work through observation. These three perspectives continuously intersect and overlap, together forming an open and fluid field of meaning.

Therefore, “World” is closer to an open container than a proposition attempting to summarize reality. The moths, bird nests, stray dogs, rooms, plants, and fragments of light appearing in his paintings are not metaphors for any grand narrative, but concrete fragments that constitute the world itself. Through painting, ZHU Xinyu continuously reorganizes and reexamines these seemingly ordinary things, establishing new relationships among them through processes of layering, transformation, and growth. What ultimately appears before the viewer is not a world that has been fully interpreted or completed, but one that continues to emerge, evolve, and remain in motion.