Hive Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the presentation of Gong Chenyu’s upcoming

solo exhibition, “Animagus”, opening at Hive Shanghai on 20 December 2024. Following “Display” (2015),

“Ice Chilling” (2018), and “Youth in the Otherland” (2022), this marks the artist’s fourth major solo exhi

bition with the gallery and reflects on Gong’s wide-ranging interest in anthropology and ethnography,

as well as his profound examination of existential circumstances of humanity in the post-pandemic time.

The artist’s painting practice serves as a vision that emerges from the very fundamentals of reality to

reveal the ambiguous, contradictory, and perplexing core of will in human nature. This exhibition is cu

rated by Zhao Xiaodan; it is on view until 22 January 2025.

The title of the exhibition, “Animagus”, a compound word invented by J.K Rowling in her Harry Potter

series, refers to the shape-shifting terminology used by wizards in the subject of Transfiguration. The

process of practising such an acquired power conceals many thrilling variables and challenges. This

idea is introduced into this exhibition not only because the word and its origin inherently carry a certain

accessibility to a mysterious and hidden world, but also because of its compatibility with the theoretical

structure of Gong Chenyu’s most recent works. From forest to tundra and then to ice field, the land

scapes in the paintings rotate as if in the elaborate Hall of Mirrors, as if the artist is tracing back along

Heilongjiang, his birthplace, to its upper reaches and further north into Siberia, to capture more spiritual

inspiration from his ancestry.

Through the study of perspectivism in anthropology, Gong Chenyu consciously constructs in his works a

pluralistic cognitive system different from the anthropocentric one. In Gong’s consequent painting expe

dition, the turbulent psychological dilemmas and moral shackles of reality become his implicit motives to

keep on marching. In his works, the shifting of perspectives accelerates the breakdown, diversion, and

dissolution of the past perceptions of the artist who intentionally remains elsewhere, as an observer. In

the process of the departure and return of consciousness and reverie, the artist’s will and ability to per

ceive the world continue to be reinforced. For Gong, the transfigured subjects in the images and the un

folding relational narratives do not only signify a fluidity in identity but that in the process of continuous

commitment and withdrawal, the empirical world grounded in reality has been replaced by a conceptual

one that transcends the present.