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EXHIBITION TITLE
2718 kg
ARTIST
Guan Yinfu
CURATOR
Cui Cancan
DURATION
2025.11.13 - 2026.01.11
VENUE
Long Museum
Triumph Gallery artist Guan Yinfu will present his latest solo exhibition, "2718 kg," at Long Museum (West Bund) on November 13, 2025. Curated by Cui Cancan, the exhibition will feature over twenty pieces created by the artist in recent years.
The exhibition “2718 kg” takes its name from the literal weight of the works it presents. It speaks of gravity not only as a physical measure but as an enduring metaphor for the essence of being and creation.
This theme originates from the artist Guan Yinfu’s contemplation of materiality. He set out to create a series of works around the idea of “weight,” seeking to reshape the relationship between art and matter. As a physical entity, every painting bears its own weight, a simple fact of its material existence. Yet upon this fact, we endow painting with layers of cultural and spiritual meaning, transcending materiality itself to attain significance.
Whether figurative or abstract, regardless of the symbols, metaphors, or analogies it carries, pigment, color, volume, and weight remain essential realities. This is both the point of departure and the destination of Guan’s practice. Beyond this origin, or beyond existence itself, lie our interpretations, imaginations, and spiritual projections, what may be called the rhetorical dimension built upon matter.
Yet Guan’s work does not employ this rhetoric but rather exposes it, deepening the very act of revelation. His paintings begin with matter itself, using the simplest elements—color, weight, form, and layering—to construct, through rhetoric and the poetry it may contain, a lexicon of materiality and its possibilities. Within this lexicon, there is no concrete reality, only stories composed of the mutability and contrast inherent in matter.
Expression is always dual. On one hand, each of Guan’s works is a word about matter—a riddle of how material and form create vision, image, perception, and spirit, prompting the viewer to reflect on the nature of painting: is it materialist or idealist? On the other hand, these works inevitably possess a rhetorical function of their own. The weight of matter generates beauty and ultimately transforms into spiritual gravity, revealing Guan’s pursuit of eternity, universality, power, transformation, vitality, and perpetual motion.
The exhibition unfolds in three sections, tracing Guan’s artistic practice over the past five years. In the Color Series, we see how he explores the fundamental questions of painting—color, form, volume, and weight—and how, upon this foundation, a spiritual dialectic between content and form, reality and imagination emerges. These universal reflections then return to his personal subjectivity—to his life, experiences, and environment, and to his conscious engagement with cultural identity. In the monumental Black and White Series, Guan draws upon his long-standing sensibilities rooted in expressionism and stage design to forge a Chinese philosophical meditation on black, gray, and white, exploring the relationships among materiality, force, emptiness, and drama. His works thus exist between painting, design, relief, and stage, blurring the boundaries among image, object, and space.
In the final section of the exhibition, Guan turns to the simplicity and essence of black, seeking to construct a perceptual system that stands in contrast to the “white” of art history. Here, he invokes the spiritual symbolism contained within color: how, from the finite substance of matter, one might reach the infinite realm of spirit. Like the nature of darkness, black renders things hidden, blurred, and mysterious. It may also be said that black is born from an older, more inscrutable history, one that always carries a sense of premonition.
The newest Black Series can be seen as an homage to Robert Ryman, who devoted his life to the “white” of minimalism, and to Josef Albers, who created an encyclopedia of color. Guan borrows from their methods, carrying forward the rich legacy of minimalism. Yet, unlike their highly industrialized and intellectualized approaches, Guan has never forsaken the sensuous world. He seeks to lead abstraction toward an Eastern spirit of greater minimalism—toward those ancient, mysterious forces, the intimacy with nature, the poetic emptiness, and the enduring warmth, restraint, and simplicity that together give new meaning to “weight.”
Or, to put it simply, it is as though he were merely naming his works by their weight. Guan Yinfu is among the Chinese artists who use the most pigment, and one of the few who paint without a palette. His practice has always been devoted to an inquiry into color, weight, and matter—an inquiry that has, over time, become his own unmistakable signature.
Curator: Cui Cancan
10/21/2025
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