L ART Gallery (Shenzhen) is pleased to present Vessel as Rhetoric, a dual exhibition featuring artists Xu Jiawei and Olga Shcheblykina, curated by Gan Ting. On view from 28 August through 20 October 2026, the exhibition takes the archetypal structure of the “vessel” and feminist technologies and methodologies as its point of departure, opening a dialogue between two female artists from different cultural contexts around themes of object, emotion, history, body, and generative space.

Both artists repeatedly return to objects, forms, and visual motifs associated with the “vessel.” Xu Jiawei renders classical European vessels and objects—crystal goblets, armour, silver platters—through the medium of ink and wash. In the absorbing and permeating qualities of this Eastern medium, objects are extracted from their everyday order and transformed into carriers of emotion, memory, history, and culture. Olga Shcheblykina, meanwhile, directly titles many of her works Vessel. Using fabric, pigment, and soft structures, she creates boundless, unstable generative spaces that subvert the material form of the vessel. In her practice, she also summons “sticks” as a technological presence of extension and connection, constructing spatial structures through heterogeneous tension in concert with the “vessel.”

Through physical vessels, vessels of language and metaphor, and vessels of formal structure, the two artists interlink matter and culture, emotion and life, painting, space and bodily experience, alongside gendered reflections on cultural structures.

Academic Host

Lü Peng

Curator

Gan Ting

Artists

Olga Shcheblykina

Xu Jiawei

Duration

2026.08.28-2026.10.20

Address

L Art Gallery, L230, 2nd Floor, Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, No. 2009 Fuzhong 1st Road, Futian District, Shenzhen, China