The duo exhibition "Under Shadows" featuring artists Hu Shunxiang and Tamara Kvesitadze opened at KORNFELD Gallery in Berlin. The exhibition presents more than ten oil paintings created by Hu Shunxiang in recent years, most of which were produced during her residency in Germany in 2024. Together with the works she exhibited in "The Layers of Existence: Image and Soul" this past March, these pieces form two sides of the same coin, unfolding a dialogue between "Here" and "Elsewhere," while laying bare the cruelty and truth embedded in everyday life.
In a corner of the group exhibition "The Layers of Existence: Image and Soul" at Leo Gallery this past March, artist Hu Shunxiang suspended her daily used, paint-stained rags into a stepped installation. On the opposite wall, photographs documented a three-meter-high steel ladder in her Berlin studio during her residency at the end of 2024, which became both a physical and psychological passageway: the single window hung high above the ladder's top, its textured glass framing the view outside as an abstract painting. The daily act of climbing gradually evolved into a miniature ritual — the vertical distance from the enclosed studio to the outside world served as both a physical crossing and a psychological translation between "Here" and "Elsewhere."
The ladder's rungs unexpectedly became a measure of time. In Berlin, she used the same brand of linen cloths to wipe her brushes, hanging these pigment-soaked pieces sequentially on the rungs. Over the course of her residency, the ladder became progressively covered with mottled, colorful fabric, the accumulated chaotic hues seeming to record the anxiety of creation and the strangeness of living abroad. When a visitor to her studio pointed out that this everyday scene "is itself a work of art," Hu recognized the dual narrative embedded within it. After returning to China, she saved an equivalent amount of paint rags accumulated over a similar period of working hours, simultaneously reconstructing the ladder in the Shanghai exhibition space: Berlin's steel ladder extended upward, pointing toward a yearning for the outside world, while Shanghai's version became a fragile suspended ladder, spiraling down from the ceiling. The former represents the departure from "Here to Elsewhere," the latter the descent of "Elsewhere returning to Here." Together, the two works form a closed loop, achieving a dialectic between "Here" and "Elsewhere" — as Berlin transformed from an "Elsewhere" filled with both longing and fear into a "Here" lived and experienced, those hung cloths became both evidence of creative labor and soft yet tenacious anchors of memory in cultural migration.
As the first Chinese artist invited to participate in 68projects, the residency program at Berlin's Kornfeld Gallery, Hu Shunxiang returned to Germany in 2024 carrying two diametrically opposed emotional memories: the shadow of a terrorist attack at Düsseldorf's main train station six years earlier, and the natural longing that contemporary art practitioners feel for Berlin, the "capital of the world's exiles."
Her 2017 trip to Germany had been an ordinary journey, until she encountered an axe attack at the Düsseldorf main train station. She and her friend were only 50 meters from the attacker, witnessing the chaotic scene of multiple people injured. This trauma fermented over the following six years into a deep-seated fear of German public spaces, to the extent that even in 2024, when she officially moved into her Berlin studio as a resident artist, she still dared not take public transportation alone at night. At the same time, Berlin, as one of the world's most important contemporary art hubs, carries the legends of countless "artistic exiles," the entire city feeling like a giant installation piece. Hu gradually learned to distinguish between two German experiences: Düsseldorf was a specimen of traumatic memory, while Berlin was living tissue. After finishing her residency and returning to China, Hu realized she had finally completed that metaphorical act: just as one must return to the site of drowning to overcome a fear of the ocean, she had transformed Berlin from a "psychological Elsewhere" into a "habitable Here."
The exhibition that opened on June 14 this year featured four faces created by Hu during the early stages of her Berlin residency — not portraits in the traditional sense, but rather visual psychological experiments in which the artist transforms her urban experience into facial blanks. This set of small-scale works, all the same size, records her process from unfamiliarity to tentative dialogue with Berlin. The second piece from left to right directly quotes the terrified expression of the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, an image symbolizing violent aesthetics that becomes the externalized carrier of the artist's subway phobia. The ambiguity of the third piece perhaps best captures the quality of Berlin's winter. The moist, hazy facial contours evoke three simultaneous states: breath visible in cold air, the condensation on bus windows, and the cognitive blur created by cultural barriers. These faces are neither self-portraits nor portraits of others, but rather shorthand expressions of the mutual shaping between city and artist, the brushstrokes becoming traces of psychogeographic mapping.
When Hu arrived in Berlin in late autumn, the city's palette was undergoing its most dramatic transformation of the year. In the first few weeks, she eagerly captured the last of the autumn colors, but the arrival of daylight saving time acted like a giant eraser, gradually wiping away the city's spectrum. The rapid change of colors produced a strange chemical reaction with the retinal memory of Chengdu, where she usually lives — that city, perpetually shrouded in greenery, had never given her such a clear signal of seasonal transition. The 40-minute bus route from her residence to the studio became her "observation laboratory"; the visual deprivation paradoxically activated her instincts as a colorist. In the second half of her residency, as Christmas approached, Berlin began to seep out jewel-like points of color: the turmeric light of market stalls, the magenta ribbons on Christmas trees, the colorful hats of passersby on the streets… When she completed her final works in Berlin, she found that her palette had unconsciously shifted away from its previously dark and somber tones, revealing bright and vibrant colors, as if her retina, after prolonged color deprivation, had produced compensatory hallucinations.
The two paintings Berlin: A Winter's Fairy Tale are like twin sisters with distinctly different personalities. The first echoes the bitter cold depicted in Heine's poetry, while the second bears witness to the warmth of everyday life. Together, they narrate the process from confrontation to reconciliation between the artist and the city. The smaller piece, completed first, carries the gloom of her early days in Berlin. In the almost chaotic dark-toned image, two vaguely formed infants lie side by side on a round table, their bodies in a mirror-symmetrical pose — the title is taken from a fragment of Heine's long poem Germany: A Winter's Tale, and those lines about political upheaval form a cruel contrast with the infants' defenseless bodies. Her encounter with an elderly man in a mustard-yellow coat at a flea market, however, redefined her understanding of "fairy tale." The vendor spoke no English; through gestures, Hu ended up taking home a small antique iron. Behind the eighty-year-old vendor, a red-and-white striped awning like a faded flag, his age-spotted hand offered her a piece of golden candy that, under the December sun, resembled a miniature sun. Hu captured this moment with an unusually figurative approach: the old man sitting alone behind a dark red backdrop, his hat solemn, the atmosphere peaceful and warm.
ARTnews: You created a body of work during your Berlin residency at the end of 2024, and then another body after returning to China, exhibited in Berlin and Shanghai respectively this year. From your perspective as the creator, what are the differences between these two bodies of work?
Hu Shunxiang: The series I created after returning to China is indeed darker and heavier than the work from Berlin. Thinking back now, this contrast reveals a truth: when we're in a foreign land, we're often driven by novelty and to-do lists, leaving no time to process deeper emotions. The work exhibited in Shanghai in March is like a late memoir of Berlin. Those violent images of cut tongues, mouths opening in the fog, the footless bird that can never land — they are all emotions suppressed by adrenaline in Berlin, finally finding an outlet after I returned to a familiar environment.
The interesting thing is that the work created in Berlin appears more "carefree" or "brave" simply because the anxiety there was too concrete, too material: What if I miss the last bus? How do I say this in English? These practical concerns masked deeper spiritual struggles. But after returning home, the canvas became a receiver for all the delayed emotions — when the adventure gave way to daily life, all those numbed nerves woke up again, leaving wounds on the canvas even more real than those from Berlin.
ARTnews: Were there any specific fragments of daily life or observations in the unfamiliar environment of Berlin that eventually transformed into emotional landscapes on your canvas?
Hu Shunxiang: While creating Fox Comes at Night, I came to understand my own state in Berlin. The first time I encountered a fox on a Berlin street corner, some sense of recognition struck me. I later learned that the fox is an important metaphor in Berlin's culture: they are numerous but rarely seen, always moving, always adapting. The fox in the painting represents both Berlin and me — appearing briefly on the street and then vanishing. This contradictory posture mirrors my own situation: someone who doesn't belong to this city yet has to carefully pass through this unfamiliar place.
ARTnews: After the Berlin residency, did you gain any new insights into painting?
Hu Shunxiang: The sense of being stripped bare in a strange place made me realize for the first time that vulnerability can become nourishment for creativity. Before, I always played the role of an "objective observer" in my work, using painting to conceal emotions. What the Berlin residency truly gave me was the luxury of being allowed to be vulnerable. These works may be the richest in revealing my deep emotions in recent years. I suddenly discovered that expressing vulnerability is a very good thing — it can constitute a complete person, and it can constitute a complete work.
ARTnews: Through your Berlin residency experience, how do you understand the relationship between "Elsewhere" and "Here"?
Hu Shunxiang: "Elsewhere" and "Here" are like two sides of a coin. The residency in Berlin gradually diluted the lingering shadow of fear, and the everyday reality of "Elsewhere" becoming "Here" also diminished my fantasies about it. However, after I returned to China, the memory of Berlin unexpectedly took on a heavier weight. This cognitive shift made me understand that no matter how much we long for a certain life, it will eventually reveal its cruel and true face. In this year's Shanghai exhibition, there was a piece titled Iris, depicting one person handing a flower to another. While painting it, a line ran through my heart: Berlin, I will come back again.
