Platform China｜Gu Liming's solo exhibition "Images in the Interstices" will open on May 22

Platform China Contemporary Art Institute is pleased to present Images in the Interstices, a solo exhibition by Gu Liming, opening on May 22 in space A. The exhibition is under the academic direction of Wang Min’an. Gu Liming’s practice has long been devoted to the question of artistic ontological language within geo-cultural contexts, persistently responding to the transmutations of history and culture.

“Images in the Interstices” serves as a footnote to Gu Liming’s creative endeavor. The interstice is not an empty void, nor a ruptured abyss—it is the dialogical field between history and the present, the connective tissue between past visual experience and contemporary perceptual practice. Gu Liming’s work unfolds precisely within this “interstice”: he has no intention of closing the gap; rather, he allows the interstice itself to become the expressive nucleus. The weathered traces salvaged from the Mawangdui tombs, Buddhist statuary, and landscape relics; the chromatic textures extracted from folk woodblock prints and kiln-transmuted ceramics; the linear tensions distilled from Wei-Jin sculptures and door-god totems—from these interstices grows his singular artistic language, at once a tender tentacle that history extends toward the contemporary, and the artist’s authentic response to the ceaseless dismantling and reconstitution of traditional imagery. When we speak of the inheritance and transformation of art, we never speak of mere replication or imitation, but of a practice that retrieves traces from the fissures of history and reconstructs language within the conditions of the present.

Wang Min’an has characterized Gu Liming’s work as a “melancholic archaeology.” In essence, it is a sustained excavation of traditional imagery. Within the interstices of images, he preserves the vestiges of time. As the aura of tradition gradually dissipates and the sacred withdraws, only these traces endure—persisting always between history and the present.

Northern Qi Dynasty-Hands of Buddha, 2014

A Melancholic Archaeology

— On the Painting of Gu Liming

Gu Liming’s use of line is singular in its own right. Line is the fundamental artistic language of Chinese traditional painting—a medium that unites form, expressivity, symbolism, aesthetic sensibility, rhythmic vitality (qi yun), and philosophical consciousness. It brings a scene to life, suffusing the picture with vital energy and rhythmic cadence, while simultaneously constructing a tensile space between the virtual and the real. What Chinese painters invest in their lines is not brute force, but cultivation and spiritual attainment. Even in the most exuberant hemp-fibre texture strokes (pima cun) and axe-cut texture strokes (fupi cun), lines continue to operate with disciplined order within the internal logic of fa (method). In the Western classical oil painting tradition, by contrast, line serves primarily to delineate contours, segment planar masses, and fix boundaries. It is only with modernism that line is liberated from this delimiting and determinative function—from the slight tremors of contour in Cézanne to the uninhibited splatters of Pollock and de Kooning, line increasingly gains its autonomy and becomes the visible trace of energy and force unleashed.

Yuchi Gong on Horse No.02

Oli on Canvas

195×130cm，2020

Gu Liming stands apart from both of these linear traditions. The line in his paintings is neither a matter of “drawing” or outlining, nor a flow of qi yun, nor a violent discharge of force. On the contrary, it is a line of flight and of demolition: flight from figuration, dismantling of substance. In other words, these lines are above all destructive—they destroy the established systems and styles of signification, and they destroy the mythology of the image.

Demolition and flight, this is Gu Liming’s method of dealing with images. He confronts a system of visual symbols so familiar within the Chinese tradition that it has become entirely taken for granted. These highly mythologized symbols—the door gods, the Buddha, the landscape—have been solidified in two divergent directions: enshrined as aesthetic canons by the classical tradition, and reduced to hollow cultural markers by the age of consumption. Faced with such symbols, cultural conservatism attempts to restore meanings already exhausted, while contemporary art’s habitual strategy is a postmodern gesture of playful appropriation. Gu Liming chooses a third path: what he undertakes is a dismantling of the image—neither an ironic appropriation nor a devotional return.

Ride with Good Luck

Pastel, Watercolor, Pencil, Wax Paper Collage, etc.

76×53cm，2016

What kind of dismantling is this? The traditional door-god painting is a rigorously functional image: its purpose is to ward off evil and protect the household, or to welcome auspicious fortune. The door god thus has a stable iconography—majestic and imposing, or dignified and sumptuous, clad in official robes and armor with weapons, colossal in stature and ferocious in countenance. This is the image-mythology of the door god. But in Gu Liming’s “Door Gods” series, these myths are dismantled one by one. What we see is no longer a determinate and luminous divine figure, but a spectral apparition: the contours of the body remain but have grown blurred; the colors are still present but diluted; the structure persists but has been disrupted. And all of this is accomplished through the chaotic flight and dismantling of lines across the picture plane. These lines escape the fixed boundaries of body and figure, streaming freely across the surface, unsettling the stability and solemnity of the image. Yet they do not completely dissolve the image’s underlying structure—the clear and stable face of the god is gone, but the god’s internal structural logic remains. In this respect there is an affinity with the structural demands of Cubism, but where Cubism dismantles the image primarily through the superimposition and juxtaposition of geometric color planes, Gu Liming does so through the unyielding curves, the sinuous turns, the crisscrossing and flight of line.

Shanshui Fu-Qingquan Kuang No.13

Watercolor and Pastel on Paper

42×59.4cm，2021

“Shanshui Fu” series and “Mawangdui” series operate along similar lines. In his “Shanshui Fu”, we can barely make out the approximate structure of nature—a structure that is even more abstract, more skeletal. We can only say that we discern the hidden traces of nature. These traces are likewise composed of tangled linear scratches and splashed ink. They interweave in layers, covering one another. The bleeding of watercolor does not lead to the dwelling-and-wandering atmosphere peculiar to classical landscape painting, but rather to a carnival of color. Assertive greens, purples, and reds spread, permeate, and mutually devour one another across the paper in a manner that borders on chaos. They do not confirm, depict, or even etherealize any particular natural landscape. Or rather, they dismantle the visible spectacle of nature itself. This is less a landscape in the iconographic sense than a “stratigraphic structure” in the geological sense. The superimposition of line upon line, the admixture of color upon color, the intercrossing of trace upon trace—all of this is like time slowly depositing itself within time. Here, too, it is an abbreviated structure that dismantles a rich figuration. Or rather, it is abstraction’s dismantling of the image, except that the abstraction here corresponds to geological accumulation. If the ideal of classical landscape painting is always an evocation—evoking the viewer’s imaginative wandering (wo you), inviting one to immerse oneself and feel the consolation of nature. Then what Gu Liming’s “Shanshui Fu” offers is a different kind of abstract structural schema: an unpredictable geological brute force, rubble shattered beyond repair, and the natural debris of industrial society. A landscape that could once serve as a dwelling place has transformed into a shattered modern industrial ruin. This is both a scene of reality within reach and a critical inquiry imbued with historical vision.

Variations-No.3

Pastel, oil, resin adhesive, and other materials on paper

37.5×50cm，1992

If “Door Gods” and “Shanshui Fu” series are both dismantlings of image-mythologies, then the earlier “Mawangdui” and “Buddhist Sculpture” series are more like responses to the weathered traces of ancient entities. In fact, Gu Liming began his work not from the image but from the object itself. The textiles, lacquerware, and garments long sealed within the Mawangdui tombs—their mottled traces, their decayed textures, their damaged patterns, their corroded fibers and peeling lacquer layers—the entire process of temporal corrosion of all this has been transposed by Gu Liming onto canvas. What interests him is decay, what remains, ruination. The abstraction in his painting corresponds not to the object itself, but to the object’s decay and its residuality. His Buddhist sculptures draw primarily from the Northern Qi and Northern Wei periods. Northern Qi Buddhist statues are renowned for their serenity—the placidity of the face, the stability of the body, the softness of line, all conveying an absolute tranquility that transcends the joys and sorrows of the human world. But when Gu Liming depicts these statues, he is not replicating this tranquility; rather, he injects into it the weathering of time. He uses pencil extensively to delineate contours, applies pastel with a light hand, giving the picture a texture of “ash”—as though these Buddhist figures were not freshly painted but had been slowly ground down and eroded by the long passage of time. The combination of pastel and pencil produces a singular effect: the contours are clear, yet they seem perpetually on the verge of dissipation; the color is present, yet it appears to be fading.

 Shanshui Fu-Visualizing Spring No.06

Watercolor and Pastel on Paper etc.

42×29.7cm，2020

In this sense, Gu Liming is not painting the sacredness of the Buddha image; he is painting how that sacredness becomes mottled and damaged in time—just as the objects from Mawangdui undergo a process of residuality. If “Door Gods” series and “Shanshui Fu” series allow ancient images to reappear in the contemporary as blurred apparitions, then “Mawangdui” series and “Buddhist Sculpture” series make visible the process of weathering and corrosion of these ancient objects themselves—the former displaying image-remnants, the latter displaying material-remnants. Gu Liming’s painting can be described as an image-apparition that disintegrates the image; an image-remainder that lets the object decay. Here, painting is less a creation of new images than a tracing of the disintegration of images and objects: both the disintegration of the image itself and of the object itself, and the disintegration of the sacredness that the image and the object carry. The subjects Gu Liming selects all possess sacredness: the majesty of the door god, the serenity of the Buddha, the auspiciousness of Fu, Lu, and Shou—all promise protection. They are therefore enshrined; they are guardians of the symbolic order. But in Gu Liming’s hands, this sacredness collapses and disintegrates. It is thus a disintegration in a double sense: the disintegration of the image itself and the disintegration of the sacredness that the image carries.

Mountain and Pond

Glass, Lacquer,  Canvas, Acrylic, etc.

160×124cm，2026

Mountain and Pond (Detail)

Evidently, this disintegration is a protracted historical process. Gu Liming’s paintings on flat support—none of them particularly large in scale—therefore harbor the seeds of time. In his most recent spatial glass installations, he grafts object and painting together: he uses a new material—glass—to display classical landscape imagery, while using the purely anti-image materiality of raw lacquer (da qi) to capture and dissolve those disappearing, rust-corroded objects. The crystalline glass sweeps away the rust of the object; the flat lacquer sweeps away the remnants of the image. What remains now is neither the apparition of the image nor the remainder of the object, but a transparency with nothing left to conceal. The natural landscape seems to have returned, but it has been rendered decorative and hollowed out—just as people transform already-decayed landscapes into decorative, empty installations. A mood of melancholy has given way to a mood of vanity. Perhaps, for Gu Liming, an era of mourning history is transitioning into an era of forgetting history. This era is so transparent, so lucid, that like the anti-image lacquer background, it amounts to nothing at all.

Mountain and Pond · Rhythm No.5 

Acrylic paint, oil paint, glass, Xuan paper, pigments, pearl powder, etc.

20×20cm×4，2026

Whether it is the residual or the transparent, both signify that this is also an era in which the aura disappears. The sacred aura of these traditional images disintegrates into the weathered traces of history. Gu Liming draws on Cubism to dismantle the image, on Abstract Expressionism to let brushstrokes flee freely, and on Pop Art to incorporate popular and folk imagery into the framework of elite painting. He is by no means paying homage to these Western modernist styles; rather, he is attempting, through this process of systemic disintegration, to expose the ruins of the epoch as he experiences it. After the unstoppable storm of historical progress, a once integral and self-consistent cultural totality has collapsed into a heap of fragments.

Evidently, this work is suffused with melancholy. It is melancholy in the Benjaminian sense: the melancholic does not remain trapped in the glories of the past, but, confronted with the ruins that the past has piled up, still strives to extract from them fragments of meaning. Gu Liming’s painting can be understood as precisely such a “melancholic archaeology”—he searches, sifts, and touches again and again on the ruins of tradition, gathering those fragments of history back together on his canvas. And none of this is for the purpose of restoration, but of display: a display of the aura’s disappearance, a display of the process by which a certain classical style collapses, a display of the ruinification of the historical process, and a staging of display itself in an era in which everything is being displayed.

Gu Liming, born in Weifang, Shandong Province, in 1963. Graduated from the China Academy of Art with a doctorate. Lives and works in Beijing. Former faculty at the China Academy of Art; currently Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University. Since the 1980s, Gu Liming has pursued abstract art and was deeply involved in the ’85 New Wave Art Movement. His practice has consistently explored artistic language within a geocultural context, responding to the evolution of historical culture.

Selected Solo Exhibitions: Images in the Interstices, Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing (2026); Gu Liming: The Trace of Landscapes, Spring Art Museum, Shanghai (2025);  Representation and Will: Gu Liming Art Exhibition, Red Top Contemporary Art Center, Xiamen(2024); Gu Liming’s Artistic Language Transformation – From Mawangdui to Shanshui Fu, Jiushi Art Museum, Shanghai (2023); Tour Exhibition of Metonymy – Thirty Years of Gu Liming’s Art, Shandong Provincial Museum, Jinan; Art Museum of the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing; Shiwuyuan Art Museum, Weifang (2017); Door Gods and Flowers – Oil Paintings by Gu Liming and Wang Haiyan, Hong Kong City Hall, Hong Kong (2015); Transformation of Tradition: Paintings of Gu Liming, Soka International Art Center, Beijing (2013); Transformation of Tradition: Paintings of Gu Liming, Artron Art Centre, Shenzhen (2012)

Selected Group Exhibitions: Glasstress: The Modern Art Revolution in Venice, Tsinghua University Art Museum, Beijing (2026); Perpetuity: Pathways of Artistic Transcendence, Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzhou (2026); Season Two: A Survey of Chinese Non-Objective Art | Non-Objectivity as Attitude, Spring Art Museum, Shanghai (2025); Chinese Expression 2024, YI Art Museum, Beijing (2024); Rebirth of the Hinterland: The 4th China Xinjiang International Art Biennale, Xinjiang Art Museum, Urumqi (2024); Materialist Thinking: The 1st International Contemporary Material Art Biennale, Nanchizi Art Museum, Beijing (2023);  Harmony-Dynamic-Power – The 1st Jinan International Biennale, Shandong Art Museum, Jinan (2021); Chinese Spirit: The 4th China Oil Painting Exhibition – Abstract Art Section, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2018); Chinese Oil Painting Art International Tour Exhibition, Palazzo Vittoriano, Rome, Italy; Palais Brongniart, Paris, France (2016-2018); Non-figurative, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2015); Me, 1985–2015 – Shen Qin, Su Xinping, Meng Luding, Gu Liming, 798 Phoenix Art Space, Beijing (2015); National Style – Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Art Works, Galleri Astley Museum, Uppsala, Sweden; Deyakirev Modern Art Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2015); China Contemporary Oil Painting Art Exhibition and 100 Years of Chinese Oil Painting Retrospective, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2014); Open China Art, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2007); Unfolding Realism – Mainland Chinese Oil Painting since 1978, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2006); The Open Era – China Contemporary Art Invitation Exhibition, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2003); 1st Beijing International Art Biennale, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2003); Gateway to the Century – Chinese Art Invitation Exhibition, Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art, Chengdu (2000); Exhibition of 20th Century Chinese Oil Painting, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (1996); 1989 Exhibition of Chinese Modern Art, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (1989)

Public Collections: Gu Liming's works are collected by various art institutions both domestically and internationally, including the National Art Museum of China, Shanghai Art Museum, University Museum and Art Gallery of The University of Hong Kong, Shandong Art Museum, Shandong Museum, Beijing Dadu Oil Painting Art Museum, China Academy of Art, Luohu Art Museum in Shenzhen, Tanghu Art Museum in Wuhan, Art Museum of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, National Centre for the Performing Arts, National Museum of China, Soka Art Center in Taiwan, Changliu Art Museum in Taiwan, and the Art Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts at Tsinghua University.