Liang Fu
“I think about how a material can introduce an image, how the central element can appear and disappear at the same time, as matter collapses.”
– Liang Fu, 2026
“‘Things flow about so here,’ Alice thought to herself.”
– Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1871
In a cinematic crop, two hands hold a translucent and turquoise shape like a found treasure of wonder and substance. This cordate shape seems to be made of glass as if it represented an inner sensitivity – a clear, fragile heart. In the smaller format of Liang Fu’s painting, it seems to be on the verge of melting, as if expressing an emotional state of vulnerability. This image also introduces the notion of transience which permeates the works of Paris-based Chinese artist Liang Fu.
This painting Melting Thoughts was the point of departure for Liang Fu’s new series of approximately thirteen wall works, characterised by its aquatic and lunar atmosphere. This ‘sublunar’ effect is rendered through the artist’s specific approach that interconnects image and matter. Liang Fu has developed a distinctive practice that reconciles figuration with experimentation. In line with artists such as Sigmar Polke, he gives leeway to the transformative power of materials and explores the sensuality of paint. He prepares his own pigments, notably mixing in mica quartz, which gives his paintings an extremely luminous quality that takes on a pearlescent sheen. All the while, his process of layering and playing with the thickness of paint allows him to materialise transparency and liquidity. We move from a very mat surface to oily, translucent and vapourous textures.
In this exhibition, Fu goes a step further than his previous series, in the revelation of materials, through works engraved on selenite and paintings mounted in sculpted stone frames. The paintings with marble star-shaped frames evoke a very contemporary neo-gothic subcultural aesthetic, perhaps shaped by fantasy video-game iconography.
Liang Fu dives deep into a search for the source of what makes an image appear: following lines, colours, materials... Materials are not only a means for the image to take shape, but are also revealed as a subject, as a presence. Thus, Fu oscillates throughout the series between the presentation of materials (mica quartz, marble, Chinese selenite) and the representation of materials (cristalised shapes, thistles and melancholic star-like corners).
In Engulfed, a figure is immersed in a sea of pigments materialising the beauty and preciousness of the natural world that surrounds us, with which we co-exist. The work is also a response to our contemporary condition of digital overflow and the current geopolitical climate. It might also carry an ecological undertone, hinting at the rise of waters with climate change. It brings to mind the climate-fiction classic by J. G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962), where cities are submerged because the ice caps have melted. In the book, humans are forced back into an aquatic environment, where their minds revert to ancient, prehistoric layers of the unconscious. For Engulfed Liang’s Fu has started with the painting on the ground, pulverising pigments, sprinkling quartz and layers of blues – from grey-blue to violet – are built gradually to produce shifting chromatic depths. The surface appears unstable, it changes according to the light, as our eyes calibrate emulsions and branching formations emerge. The artist notes: “these traces resemble drawings on sand that appear and disappear with the tide. Those ephemeral shapes.”
In Liang Fu’s world, faces appear. They undulate, distort, and transform because of the movement of water, sheets of glass, or shimmering veils. These translucent materials allow optical play and seem to function much like Lewis Carroll’s looking glass: a passage from the ordinary into an imaginative realm where everything is displaced. In Delusion, Fu depicts an Odilon Redon–like eye, smudged, leaking and doubled, as though reflected in a tear. In most works the eyes are closed suggesting a state of sleep, placing us within this realm of dreams, where new images occur in an unstable reality. For psychoanalysis, Carl Jung “water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of the dark psyche.” We descend into a subterranean world which, according to ancient cosmologies, is governed by the moon. Fu paints nongender specific portraits further reinforcing the notion of the fluidity of being and identity. Some of the characters carry a talismanic object in their mouths: a star, a flower, a mineral shape as if they had found a clue to a dream or a token of beauty and hope in dark depths.
Fu has a practice of diving which has informed the atmosphere of his works. Some of the senses are withdrawn, especially speech, as if the figures were mute. The figures seem to exist between dreaming and a fragile state, as if they were out of breath. The images that Fu conjures are fantastical, yet they are also drawn from the everyday environments that he absorbs. On the outskirts of Paris, Fu is moved by the vulnerable beings he encounters, sleeping in the street, sometimes between life and death. In Fu’s works images appear in broken glass (cf Melancholy surface, 2026) or actual stone shards as if fragmented (selenite works, 2026) – the image is seldom full; we see cuts, details reinforcing the notion of fragility and imperfection. It is the profound effect of the images we absorb daily, and the fragility of life, that Fu captures in the Sublunary series.
Liang Fu (b.1993, Sichuan, China) lives and works in Paris, France. With an intricate interplay of rich textures, corporeal forms, and geographical landscapes, Fu's work embodies subtle access to a series of perceptions, emotions, memories, and knowledge. Delving deep into different modes of material transformation, his experimental use of mineral pigments and other raw materials resonates with his philosophical contemplation on the passage of time and the gradual change of life as a part of the organic and sometimes mystical ecology. By often employing the figural as a rhetorical device with a warm, intimate, and gentle touch, Fu’s practice explores the synthetic relationship between the seen and the unseen, the presence and absence, and the being and non-being. Exhibitions include Sublunary, Nicodim, New York (2026, solo, forthcoming); THE BODY DOES NOT EXPLAIN ITSELF, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2026); Polyphonic Views, Funkhaus Berlin, Berlin (2025); Surgical Room, Cylinder, Seoul (2025); Spectre, Newchild, Antwerp (2025); The Amber of this Moment, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2025); Liang Fu, Chantal Khoury, Daniel Pitin, Nadia Waheed, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2024); Crépuscule, Linseed Projects at Paris-International, Paris (2024, solo); Echoes of the Void, Hive Contemporary Art Center, Shanghai (2024, solo); X Collection 202: Portrait of a Man, X Museum, Beijing (2024); The Ballad of the Children of the Czar, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2024); DISEMBODIED, curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2024); Ash to ashes, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2023, solo); Holographic Realm, Hive Contemporary, Shanghai (2023); Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest: 10 Years, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2023);《星体燎原》corps célestes, Nicodim, New York (2022, solo); DISEMBODIED, curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2022); Intangible, Nicodim Upstairs, Los Angeles (2022, solo); petit beurre, Maia Muller Gallery, Paris, France (2021).