L-Art Gallery, Room 803, Building 12, OōEli, No.398 Tianmushan Road, Xihu District, Hangzhou
On June 13, 2026, L-Art Gallery (Hangzhou) unveiled a new space at Tianmuli with the opening of artist Shi Yiran's solo exhibition "Rearview Mirror." As the inaugural exhibition at L-Art Gallery's Hangzhou venue, the show is curated by Liang Qing and presents over ten easel paintings created between 2024 and 2026, marking the official launch of the gallery's mission to champion the deep value of contemporary Chinese easel painting. Zhang Wenqi, head of L-Art Gallery (Hangzhou), shared at the opening that L-Art's decade-long experience in online art education has yielded extensive academic resources and professional expertise, and the gallery's physical incarnation is the offline extension of that foundation. She expressed her belief that outstanding works and compelling exhibitions follow their own timeline — L-Art Gallery was not founded in pursuit of short-term returns, but with a commitment to long-term value.
At the opening, Shi Yiran spoke about the creative trajectory behind the "Rearview Mirror" series — a body of work that originated from observations of everyday driving. The landscape continuously "receding" in the rearview mirror is, in a sense, how we process memory: it is always there, yet only occasionally do we catch a glimpse. The rearview mirror is not merely a spatial construct but a temporal dislocation — a visual bridge between past, present, and future. In her paintings, she quietly lays out labyrinths of overlapping reflections. The multiple spaces that conceal and reveal themselves within the frame hold her longstanding interest in visual culture and art history. Among them, the most essential space — the space of memory — is a realm of freedom where she continually draws inspiration and achieves breakthroughs.
She noted that her gradual return to oil on canvas in recent years is not a simple change of medium, but a deliberate search for a material quality that better resonates with the theme of "memory" — the dense, arrested materiality inherent to oil paint. In addition, she works with markers, pastels, and gold leaf, alternating between materials according to the layered needs of each painting, unlocking different registers of painterly pleasure. In her view, the "weaknesses" of certain materials can yield more compelling results — "because AI wouldn't make those 'low-level' mistakes."
The exhibition unfolds from a wall of sketches and manuscripts, gradually transitioning to large-scale oil paintings in the main gallery, offering viewers a first point of entry. The dense collection of sketches and notes resembles the artist's workbench — filled with symbols that demand "local reading," laying bare the informational codes embedded in Shi Yiran's painting process. They document how she dissects, encodes, and reassembles visual information gathered from different locations. Upon entering the gallery and encountering these manuscripts first, viewers come to understand that interpreting Shi Yiran's paintings requires starting from "place" — every "mechanism" she sets within the picture is tied to a specific spatial experience.
The thematic subjects of the paintings in this exhibition can be vastly expanded through their geographic and spatial dimensions — the snowy windowscapes of Aoluguya, the ancient knotting techniques of maritime civilizations witnessed at a navigation museum in Hawaii, the landscape calendars hanging in the living rooms of Chinese households of the 1980s generation, the showrooms of car dealerships and café counters in the city. To understand what the gestures, actions, and objects in these paintings truly express requires entering the "local customs" of each place. The "death" that the market refuses to embrace is, in fact, the reindeer worship embodying aspiration and progress within the Tungusic language family; how an airport lounge evolves from a transit point into a site where multiple temporalities converge; how the hierarchical relationship between technology and the domestic, between grand narrative and micro-history, is dismantled within the museum — these meanings are embedded within specific "structures of place," and one must retrace the artist's thinking as she engaged with each particular location to uncover the meanings and inferences lodged within those local structures.
Through traveling and creating in artist residencies across various locations, Shi Yiran has progressively incorporated puzzle-like details into her paintings. The many minute clues that appear through collage are deliberate unlocking mechanisms or treasure-hunting components she has specially planted. In practice, what she self-deprecatingly calls "grafting and transplanting" in her compositions has also, perhaps unintentionally, embedded a working method akin to printmaking, bringing an even richer legibility to her work.
