Installation view, Bian Kai: Conjuring Realities

Bian Kai: Conjuring Realities
On view through August 17, 2025
Red No. 1-B1, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District, Beijing

INKstudio is proud to present Bian Kai: Conjuring Realities, the first solo exhibition for the Liaoning-born visual artist Bian Kai (b. 1981). In his contemporary painting practice, Bian Kai draws extensively upon China’s rich mythological, philosophical and religious narrative traditions referencing classical texts—such as the Warring States Era Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Six Dynasties Peach Blossom Spring and the Tang Dynasty Buddhist Canon A Biography of The Tripiṭaka Master of the Great Ci’en Monastery—to render modern parables for our contemporary times. Using the various historical, heavy-polychrome, visual-narrative languages employed in Buddhist and Taoist temple murals, Tibetan Buddhist thangkas and Chinese imperial court painting, Bian Kai visually reconstitutes the mythological, religious content of his source material but never in a direct retelling or portrayal of the canonical story or image. Rather, in what he describes as painting as “performance” yan 演 or art(ifice), he transforms the canonical telling to conjure a “truth” zhen 真 for his audience that is both transcendent and personal.

The exhibition features the artist’s representative masterworks from the last ten years including (on the first floor) Next Stop: Peach Blossom Spring 下一站桃花源 (2024) from his “City” series; the monumental screen The Unbound Journey 逍遥 (2022) from his “Wandering Far and Wide” series; and its companion work Cosmography of the Primordial 山 · 海 (2020) from his “Mountains and Seas” series; and (on the third floor) The Shore of Enlightenment 慧岸 (2018) from his “Religions” series; and the left-incomplete, six-panel work Peach Blossom Spring: Arcadia as Unfinishable 未完成的桃花源 (2016) from his “Peach Blossom Spring” series.

The exhibition will be up for over ten weeks and will function as an open research workshop where Bian Kai will collaborate with graduate researchers Nancy CHU from Stanford University and Chuxin ZHANG from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, the curator Deng Feng from the National Art Museum of China, and others to excavate and record the many layers of historical, philosophical, religious, literary and mythological content resident in his extraordinary conjured realities.

To learn more, click here.