Hive Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Luochen Zhang’s solo exhibition Real Presence, opening on September 12, 2026, in Galleries B and C at Hive Center for Contemporary Art’s Beijing headquarters. As the 66th exhibition of the Hive Becoming Project (HBP), this show will feature over ten recent paintings by the artist. Born in 2004, Luochen Zhang received his BFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in 2026. While painting serves as his primary medium, his practice also extends to video and installation. He has long explored the relationships between space, viewing, the body, and behavior, drawing on visual languages from film, photography, architecture, public environments, and everyday life to dismantle, shift, and reorganize spatial structures derived from reality. Curated by Xia Xiaoyan, the exhibition will run through November 4, 2026.

“When I walk, I part the air, and always, the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been.” In Mark Strand’s poetry, things often occupy a strange liminal state: they are present, yet seem somehow not to be there; the body exists within space, yet continually disappears from it. Position, therefore, does not guarantee presence. On the contrary, when a body enters a space, it temporarily occupies a position; yet when the body departs, the space does not remain permanently vacant. The air gathers again, things rearrange themselves, and the continuity once interrupted by the body closes once more. “I move to keep things whole”—this line may offer a hidden clue to understanding Luochen Zhang’s paintings.

Zhang does not directly depict existence, time, or nothingness, yet he continually engages with structures closely related to them: an object leaving its original position, a body entering an unfamiliar scene, a familiar gesture placed within another set of relations, or a seemingly natural landscape gradually revealing traces of artificial construction. In his paintings, what often changes is not the thing itself, but the position it occupies and its relationship to other things. When an object is moved, its original function and meaning begin to loosen; when a body changes position, the direction of viewing and the meaning of an action may also shift; and when a familiar spatial order is displaced, we begin to realize that relationships once regarded as natural have in fact always depended on a particular arrangement.

In Zhang’s work, space is not merely a backdrop for figures and objects. Scale, distance, light, perspective, obstruction, and the positional relationships between objects collectively form an implicit structure that influences bodily action and modes of viewing. The artist’s focus is less on what a space is than on how relationships within it are established, and how our understanding of space, behavior, and reality changes once those relationships shift. In recent years, Zhang’s practice has gradually shifted from observing spatial forms to exploring spatial relationships and the mechanisms through which they are produced. Objects from everyday experience, bodily postures, and natural environments are reorganized through painting. A familiar object may be placed in an unfamiliar position; a seemingly natural scene may reveal traces of artificial construction; and an action that originally carried a clear meaning may take on a new interpretation as its surrounding conditions change.

“Movement” thus becomes an important clue to understanding the exhibition. Here, movement is not merely a physical change in position, but a redistribution of existing relationships. The position of an object can be shifted, the position of a body can be shifted, and the viewer’s position can likewise be shifted; when a position changes, the meanings associated with it change as well. Relationships that are taken for granted in everyday experience are thus revealed not as naturally given, but as continually established within specific spatial conditions. This focus on “position” also gives Zhang’s works a persistent sense of subtle uncertainty. He does not attempt to create a surreal world completely detached from reality; rather, he begins with real-world experience itself, using slight misalignments, cropping, obscuring, compression, and regrouping to temporarily strip familiar spaces of their original certainty. Viewers may recognize the objects in an image without immediately determining the relationships between them; they may enter a seemingly familiar scene, yet remain unable to fully interpret it according to ordinary experience.

Consequently, viewing itself becomes an important question in Zhang’s paintings. Viewing is not a neutral act that occurs outside the artwork. The viewer’s position, the direction of their gaze, obstructions within the space, and the distribution of information within the image all influence what we see, what we overlook, and how we understand what appears before us. Zhang seeks to make this usually overlooked mechanism of viewing visible, prompting viewers to recognize that they do not observe the artwork from a completely objective position, but are always already situated within the spatial relationships established by it. At the same time, the artist’s focus on bodily action has gradually become an integral part of his practice. In his paintings, the body is often placed under certain predetermined conditions: it appears to act of its own accord, yet at the same time subtly reveals a state of being arranged, guided, or even constrained. The boundaries between play and rules, freedom and control, and cooperation and confrontation thus become blurred. The artist is not concerned with any specific action, but rather with how actions acquire meaning within relationships. The same movement, under different spatial conditions, in different relationships with objects, and through different modes of viewing, may produce entirely different interpretations. In this sense, the body becomes a means through which spatial structures reveal themselves.

This line of thought extends further to Zhang’s observations of nature and reality. In his work, nature does not always appear as an unprocessed real world. Light, perspective, obstructions, paths, and modes of viewing may all participate in the construction of a natural landscape. What we call the integrity of nature may therefore itself be the result of visual experience. From here, the artist gradually approaches a more fundamental question: Why do we believe that what appears before us is real? Reality does not always present itself in a complete and stable form awaiting our confirmation. Our judgments about space and environment are often based on a multitude of visual cues, bodily experiences, and relationships between objects. When these conditions change, fractures begin to appear in what had previously seemed certain. Zhang does not rush to fill these fractures; instead, he leaves them open, allowing viewers to continually adjust their judgments between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the real and the fictional, and the natural and the artificial.

In this sense, Zhang’s paintings form a latent dialogue with French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s reflections on the “production of space.” Space is not a neutral container, but is continually produced through bodily practices, social relations, viewing, and use. Zhang transforms this mechanism—which normally remains hidden within everyday life—into a painterly language: through shifting, cropping, obscuring, substituting, and rearranging, he makes visible once again those spatial relationships that experience ordinarily naturalizes. Space produces ways of seeing; ways of seeing produce relationships; and relationships, in turn, produce our judgments about reality. Zhang’s paintings therefore do not seek to tell us what a space is; rather, they make us aware that the position we occupy, the position from which we view, and the position from which we understand the world are never naturally fixed. These positions are continually produced, and they always remain capable of being shifted. And “after the shift,” what remains is not a new and definitive answer, but a void that has yet to be fixed again. Within this void, viewers re-enter the work, seek out their own viewing positions anew, and confirm the distance between themselves and the world within constantly shifting spatial relationships.