Leo Gallery | Shanghai
Xu Dawei & Zhang Ning Dual Exhibition: Ephemera and Echo
Leo Gallery is honored to present Ephemera and Echo, a dual exhibition featuring the works of artists Xu Dawei and Zhang Ning. The exhibition brings together Xu Dawei’s paintings since 2016 and Zhang Ning’s sculpture series Mayfly and Narcissus. Through their distinct visual languages, the two artists jointly explore the fluidity of time, the reverberations of memory, and the perception of existence.
“It is only within the finite that we can sense the infinite,
only in the fleeting moment that we may glimpse the eternal.”
—John Berger
Here, time is not a river flowing linearly forward, but rather a continuous flux of perception and consciousness—what Henri Bergson termed durée. Xu Dawei’s paintings, rendered in saturated hues and intuitive brushwork, capture scenes of labor in the mountains, dancers in motion, and the silence of the land. These are not frozen moments, but fields of temporal flow. In the shadowy abyss of Undiscovered and the blurred figure, the boundaries between presence and oblivion quietly dissolve.
Zhang Ning’s Mayfly sculptures, on the other hand, freeze the mayfly’s life trajectory—from its emergence and struggle to its descent— through the paradoxical materiality of plaster. In these works, the ephemeral metamorphosis of the mayfly—born at dawn, gone by dusk—is drawn into an eternal gaze. The wings of the mayfly are as weightless and transient as the “slit of light” in Zhuangzi’ s image of “a white colt flashing past a crevice.” With a life that vanishes in an instant, the mayfly confronts the illusion described in Cai Gen Tan: “All of antiquity and the present are but ephemera.”
Though formally distinct, the works together articulate an Eastern cosmology where the moment contains the eternal. As Wang Fuzhi once wrote: “The transformations of Heaven and Earth are renewed daily”—every instant becomes a vessel of eternity. In an age increasingly shaped by digitization and virtuality, both artists resist oblivion through the traces of the hand, returning to the Eastern aesthetic ideal in which movement and stillness coexist.
Ephemera and Echo thus forms a contemplative field beyond linear time: the rushing planes of color under Orange-Red Sky are placed in dialogue with the still form of the Mayfly; the bent posture of the laborer mirrors Narcissus’ downward gaze. Together, they evoke the cyclical rhythms of growth and decay that govern all things. Existence is revealed in the fleeting, and made enduring in its echo.
