Hive Center for Contemporary Art is thrilled to announce the first solo exhibition of post-80s artist Zhang Yingnan, ‘If Unhindered’. Opening on 17 November 2024, in gallery A at the Hive Beijing space, this show focuses on a selection of major works from the artist’s recent practice. This exhibition is curated by Yang Jian and is on view through 10 January 2025. This exhibition unveils Hive Beijing’s main space after its first large-scale and complete renovation designed by architect Sun Dayong, who also serves as the exhibition designer for this show.

Like a theatre director, Zhang Yingnan sets up a myriad of deliberately designed and fabricated stages of dreamscapes, as such, we experience the internal, spiritual, and literary poetic establishment of space beyond its physical and material nature. He invokes our reflection on reality: in the clamorous and turbulent, overcrowded and confined present, is there still a space for the dwelling of poetry? Through his paintings, the artist presents us with a method to arrive at the innermost part of us, that is, to try the best to perceive life, to preserve the poetic imagination, to protect the rawness and tenderness of our hearts, and to establish the order of our internal world, so that we truly experience the here and now.

Each vacant and desolate space in the paintings signifies the lost past as well as the void of contemporary mentality and psyche and is an imaginary space where the artist stores his thoughts, feelings, and memories. What ‘If Unhindered’ portrays is far from a deserted landscape, but rather, a channelling of profound dialogue with the self through the absence of ‘people’, to evoke a focus on the true ‘nature’ of humanity in their ‘original’ state. In this carefully fabricated theatre space where the illusory and the real impact each other, the actor and audience in imagination, the character, text, and the creator gather in one place, but never really interact. It is through this dramatic interplay that the viewer is able to enter from a real, experience-based space to one that is illusory and perception-based. Here, the carefully arranged lighting solidifies in the interstices of the image like gelatin, just as the vacuum glazing in a glass window, severing the connection between the internal and external space and stagnating memory, dream, and reality; it is both a space for containing collective memories and a specially constructed stage for displaying dreams while viewing it through the window feels like a mental reminiscence and emotional archaeology of some ephemeral relationship or fragments of time and space.

However, nostalgia and sentimentality are not Zhang Yingnan’s main objectives, but rather the exploration of the implicit connection between spiritual and social spaces, and the absence of ‘people’ in the images becomes a more concrete and internalised constant presence. Perhaps, the real significance of ‘If Unhindered’ is the autonomous construction through painting, where the social relations observed by the artist are extracted from the partial interactive context and reconstructed over an uncertain span of time and space. This means that the social relations simulated in the images are no longer restricted by time and space, and can instead occur and be maintained anywhere and anytime. Although there is a limitation on the space that can be depicted, the absent ‘people’ that can be perceived are more likely to achieve the right to solitude and the freedom of silence in a more independent and concealed environment which is perhaps the artist’s eventual expectation of the ‘people’ themselves.