LIN Hongjing: LIAN: Curated by Rabbi WANG

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to present LIAN, a solo exhibition by LIN Hongjing opening on August 29, 2026. Curated by Rabbi Wang, the exhibition brings together 15 oil paintings and more than 10 works in underglaze blue-and-white porcelain, and will remain on view through September 18. Lin’s practice is rooted in lived experience and inward perception. Classical Chinese literature, tales of the strange and supernatural, and Chinese esoteric traditions provide a shifting repertoire of images and ideas from which her work develops. Texts encountered through reading are folded into dreams, memories, and fragments of everyday life; elements belonging to different times, places, and states of consciousness are allowed to coexist within the same pictorial space. Her paintings often resist linear narration. Images accumulate through association, hidden threads surface and disappear, and one motif gives rise to another. Meaning emerges through this unstable traffic between object, text, and subjective consciousness, giving Lin’s work its distinctly private visual logic.

The exhibition takes its title from 奩 (lian), an ancient Chinese casket traditionally used to hold mirrors, incense, cosmetics, and other personal effects. The Shuowen jiezi (Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters) defines the term as a “mirror casket,” while later sources broaden its usage to encompass containers for incense and personal belongings. Closely associated with the body and the private sphere, the lian inevitably acquires something of the person to whom its contents once belonged. In the Hou Hanshu (Book of the Later Han), Emperor Ming is said to have looked through the objects remaining in his late mother’s mirror casket after visiting her mausoleum and to have been overcome with grief. The lian thus becomes a vessel in which material things continue to register bodily presence after the body itself has disappeared. Within the exhibition, LIAN becomes a vessel for Lin’s inner world. Images, stories, sensations, and memories gather within it according to an intensely personal order, one shaped as much by lived experience as by the reality around her. Within Lin’s own imaginative system, Lan exists as an independent soul. Lin and Lan remain mutually dependent and responsive to one another, and their symbiotic relation forms an essential part of this psychic structure. To open LIAN, then, is to enter the enigmatic mental terrain from which Lin’s work emerges.

Lin’s engagement with classical Chinese culture ranges across literature, tales of the strange and supernatural, astral cosmology, fengshui, and traditional mantic and cosmological arts. These bodies of knowledge function as living points of reference, continually reactivated as she considers reality, existence, and the limits of perception. Her education and life within a Western cultural environment have introduced a productive tension into her relationship with inherited Chinese traditions, opening them to reinterpretation rather than fixing them within historical convention. From this cross-cultural position, classical sources become part of a contemporary inquiry into female identity and into the unstable boundary between the visible and the unseen.

Rhino Horn takes shape within a long Chinese imaginary surrounding rhinoceros horn, a material repeatedly invested with numinous and apotropaic powers. In Liu Jingshu’s Yiyuan (Garden of Marvels), Wen Jiao burns rhinoceros horn in order to reveal strange beings concealed beneath the water. Ge Hong’s Baopuzi neipian (The Inner Chapters of the Master Who Embraces Simplicity) records the tongtian xi, or “heaven-penetrating rhinoceros,” whose horn was believed to possess extraordinary protective properties; the later Xiangsheng (The Record of Incenses) describes lingxi xiang, “numinous rhinoceros incense,” made by burning powdered tongtian rhinoceros horn together with agarwood. Lin brings this textual genealogy into contact with a childhood memory: the idea that fingernails and rhinoceros horn were materially akin. The nails clipped before piano practice become a substitute for the horn and are burned, giving rise to an apparition. Within the painting, piano keys depress themselves without visible touch as figures slowly emerge around them. Painting becomes a threshold through which the visible brushes against another order of perception.

Female identity is a persistent concern throughout Lin’s work. Her small breasts rested in his palm like slumbering birds, seeming to possess a heartbeat of their own, faint and delicate. takes its title from Eileen Chang’s Red Rose, White Rose. At the center of the painting stands a three-panel dressing mirror, an object associated with self-scrutiny and the private feminine interior. Yet its reflective space is crowded with dead birds, decaying fruit, clandestine lovers, and bodies whose gender positions have been displaced or reversed. Intimacy appears here as an unstable structure in which desire, dependence, and discipline remain tightly entangled. Black Feng-Huang draws on the story of Li Fengniang, empress to Emperor Guangzong of the Southern Song dynasty. A pair of hands belonging to a palace woman, admired by Emperor Guangzong for their beauty, become the object of Li Fengniang’s jealousy; they are subsequently severed and placed in a box. In Lin’s retelling, beauty becomes inseparable from the desire to possess it, while the structures of power surrounding that desire are inscribed directly onto the flesh. Subdue the Witch! turns to later Tibetan accounts of Princess Wencheng and the subjugation of the “supine demoness.” According to this tradition, Princess Wencheng read the topography of Tibet through the principles of geomancy (kanyu), envisioning the snow-covered land as the body of a recumbent female demon. Temples were then positioned at her joints and other vital points in order to suppress her. Lin translates this ancient body–territory schema into underglaze blue-and-white painting on porcelain. Geography, religious imagination, and the female body are made to occupy the same pictorial field, turning the body into a site where structures of power and cultural imagination converge.

Taking LIAN as its central image, the exhibition marks Lin Hongjing’s first solo presentation in China. What LIAN holds are the proliferating images of Lin’s mind, alongside those forms of existence that may forever resist incorporation into reality. Here, dream acquires the density of a realm unto itself; and what comes into view within that realm is the world of Lin and Lan in its entirety.

[1] Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters), juan 5A, “Zhu bu” 竹部: “籢，鏡籢也” (“Lian: a mirror casket”). The Qing scholar Duan Yucai notes, “別作匳，俗作奩” (“also written 匳; commonly written 奩”), and cites the Guangyun 廣韻 (Expanded Rhymes): “盛香器也” (“a vessel for holding incense”).

[2] Fan Ye, Hou Hanshu 後漢書 (Book of the Later Han), juan 10A, “Huanghou ji shang: Guanglie Yin huanghou” 皇后紀上·光烈陰皇后: “視太后鏡奩中物，感動悲涕，令易脂澤裝具” (“He looked upon the objects in the Empress Dowager’s mirror casket, was moved to grief and tears, and ordered her cosmetics and dressing implements to be replaced”).

[3] See Liu Jingshu, Yiyuan 異苑 (Garden of Marvels), juan 7, on Wen Jiao’s burning of rhinoceros horn to reveal strange beings; Ge Hong, Baopuzi neipian 抱朴子內篇 (The Inner Chapters of the Master Who Embraces Simplicity), “Dengshe” 登涉, on the tongtian xi 通天犀; and Zhou Jiazhou, Xiangsheng 香乘 (The Record of Incenses), juan 9, on lingxi xiang 靈犀香. Together, these texts form a literary lineage concerning the numinous properties of rhinoceros horn, its burning, and the manifestation of extraordinary phenomena.

[4] Toghto et al., Song shi 宋史 (History of Song), juan 243, “Houfei xia: Guangzong Ciyi Li huanghou” 后妃下·光宗慈懿李皇后. The text records both the “black feng-huang” omen associated with Li Fengniang’s birth and the story in which, after Emperor Guangzong praised a palace woman’s white hands, Li ordered the woman’s hands severed and presented to him in a food box.