Leo Gallery Shanghai｜Yafeng Duan & Ling Jing Dual Exhibition : Thicket Flow

Leo Gallery is pleased to present Thicket Flow, a dual exhibition featuring artists Lin Jing and Yafeng Duan. The exhibition brings together multiple series of Lin Jing's works from 2020 onward alongside Yafeng Duan's representative large-scale abstract paintings from recent years.

"Thicket" is dense forest-interweaving, growing, and sheltering, a wild environment where color and material spread. "Flow" is passage-seeping, continuing, and never ceasing, an unfettered diffusion of energy and breath. As the Tang Dynasty poet Wei Yingwu wrote, "Flowing water threads through the quiet thicket"-water moves through the woods, weaving between clusters, gathering and dispersing, forming a primitive, vibrant, and never-ending realm of thicket flow on the canvas. Lin Jing's practice is rooted in a dual background in sculpture and design, granting her a mastery of material, structure, and texture. She builds space and order with deeply embodied arcing brushstrokes, infusing the flat surface with three-dimensional awareness, imbuing her works with a tangible sense of weight and density. From seeking the "truth of materials" to entering painting, Lin Jing frees materials from their functional purposes, allowing them to grow organically. Her colors are bold and striking. Beneath their dense, saturated surface lies a restrained yet profound emotional depth. Color, form, and texture interweave and cluster, forming a dense and tense visual thicket.

Yafeng Duan works through intuition and meditation. Light and density alternate across the canvas; color pours, seeps, and layers; brushstrokes rise and fall, following a deep rhythm. Her visual language can be understood as an exploration of "Qi" (vital energy) from traditional Chinese philosophy, blending Eastern rhythm with Western abstraction to achieve a subtle balance between presence and absence. Yafeng Duan's paintings have no fixed forms. By capturing nature's inner pulse, she condenses her perception of mist, air, and water onto the canvas. She does not intentionally shape concrete landscapes, preserving only nature's purest breath and rhythm, transforming them into free-floating and ethereal visual flow.

Thicket Flow presents a perceptual dialogue between growth and passage: they see openings within the dense thicket and accumulate weight as they move through. From Beijing to Brussels, from Hebei to Berlin, a lifetime of displacement leaves on the canvas an endless play of gathering and dispersal, continuity and extension. Standing within the thicket flow, the viewer's gaze becomes the path.