Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to present The Landscape of Infiltration, a summer group exhibition opening on July 17, 2026, at its Beijing Headquarters Space in Shunyi. Curated by Wang Shiying, the exhibition brings together recent works by six artists from China and abroad: Jesse Liu Jinghan, Sunkyung Baek, Lee Jeongwoong, Huang Tianyu, Li Yichen, and Opal Mae Ong.
The world we inhabit is not composed of discrete, independent entities; rather, it is continually forged through contact, response, and exchange. Boundaries do not always dissolve through rupture—more often, they gradually loosen through the movement of time, matter, and perception. Light filters through a room; water reshapes the form of space; the body, too, engages in constant exchange with its surroundings through breath, touch, and environmental interaction. The once-fixed divisions between subject and object, nature and humanity, interior and exterior, are continuously reorganized through processes of permeation. Landscape, therefore, is no longer an object awaiting our gaze, but an ever-emerging relational mode of perception. It takes shape at the intersection of body, memory, and environment, and continually transforms itself as different experiences enter into it. Every act of looking carries the trace of the viewer, and every landscape reflects which experiences are permitted entry into the visible. It is simultaneously an organization of visibility—what is allowed into view and what is easily overlooked is never a neutral occurrence. Painting is not a representation of reality, but a means, through the interplay of material, body, and time, of preserving those experiences not yet fully fixed by language.
The paintings of Jesse Jinghan Liu offer our inquiry into this chain of logic. Her practice has remained bound to the mutual permeation of pigment, body, and the materiality of landscape. Within her canvases, sky, moist river water, and human skin permeate and shape one another through tonal harmony; the temperature of wind, the texture of light, and the sensation of touch share no fixed boundary, together forming a visual state perpetually in flux. The tree hollows in Jesse’s paintings function precisely as portals of this bidirectional permeation: they are not fixed symbols on the canvas, but passages between reality and psychological space, where hiding, seeking, and appearing occur simultaneously—different experiences entering the painting through this threshold, each leaving its own trace.
If Jesse’s work opens up permeation at the level of visual perception, then Sunkyung Baek’s Wet Room draws that permeation back into our most intimate everyday spaces, allowing water—the gentlest of permeating media—to slowly rewrite the inherent order of the domestic dwelling. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard describes the house as a vessel for our inner world, a solid boundary protecting us from the intrusion of the external world; yet in Baek’s paintings, this boundary is gradually softened by slowly rising water: living room floors, still furniture, familiar corners—all slowly alter their original texture through the saturation of water. Water seeps into the fabric of space, blurs the edges of furniture, and leaves traces that cannot be immediately erased.
Opal Mae Ong’s paintings are built upon the continuously flowing relationship between nature, body, and intergenerational memory. Her landscapes depart from familiar natural scenes, yet they are not realistic depictions of nature: figures in her paintings lie prone at the horizon, their bodies merging with the contours of the land; or they accompany the moon, drawing mythological imagery into present perception. Within these shifting forms lie vulnerability and unease, as well as memories inherited from ancestors, etched into the body. Huang Tianyu’s work dismantles the anthropocentric viewing perspective, allowing the temporalities and experiences of different forms of life to permeate one another within the same space—channels through which different forms of experience enter one another. The growth of plants, the metamorphosis and flight of insects, the spiral and enclosure of shells—these traces of time and form from the non-human world are transformed into the structural rhythm within painting. Painting preserves these slowly occurring changes, making the work a site where different scales of life, temporal experiences, and modes of perception converge.
Beyond the mutual permeation among different forms of life, objects also participate in our spaces and relationships in their own way. Li Yichen’s screen departs from the most quotidian of Chinese objects to present the loosening of boundaries between human and thing. The screen retains this fluid quality: space is not a fixed container, but something that continuously transforms through everyday experience. The screen simultaneously provides protection in solitude and preserves the possibility of establishing connection with the outside world. When private feeling enters visible space, those emotions, needs, and relationships that resist direct description find a place to rest. What merits attention is not a determinate spatial state, but a relational position in constant flux between approach and retreat.
Lee Jeongwoong’s work interweaves Korean cultural symbols with the language of Western classical painting within a single canvas, presenting the complex state of temporal and cultural boundaries in permeation. His paintings bear the refined, ornate surface of Western classical painting, yet their imagery is deeply rooted in Korean cultural memory—traditional patterns, traces of history, the complex experiences left by the colonial era—all concealed beneath the ornate visual surface, forming a subtle tension with the Western painterly language. His paintings preserve those parts of experience that remain complex, contradictory, and unfinished; at the points where different relationships permeate one another, they leave space for looking, thinking, and perceiving to occur.
Astrida Neimanis has written of our existence in a watery world: data flows, capital flows, people, memory, and emotion all flow. Nothing solid stands forever, and no boundary remains forever unwetted. As we follow this thread through the practices of these six artists, the summer wind outside carries damp heat seeping into the room—just as we have felt so often these past months. All solid boundaries are slowly loosening; no one can stand outside the landscape as a pure observer. We are ourselves within the landscape; our breath, memory, emotion, and history continuously permeate the world around us, even as that world continuously permeates us. Reality always contains what cannot be immediately articulated: unfinished memory, vague sensation, changes that occur within the everyday yet resist language.
EXHIBITING WORKS
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Artist
Jesse Jinghan Liu
Jesse Jinghan Liu (b. 1999, Beijing, China) is a Los Angeles-based artist who graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2022 with a major in Illustration. Working primarily in oil-based mediums, Liu creates paintings centered on long-haired female figures that serve as the primary motif throughout her practice.
Drawing inspiration from both the imagined nocturnal world and the minutiae of everyday life, Liu interweaves these elements with her personal experiences to produce compositions that resonate with emotional depth. Her works employ a vivid color palette and a dynamic interplay of light and shadow to convey a spectrum of emotions within carefully constructed contexts. Through sophisticated compositional strategies, she emphasizes the significance of narrative storytelling, cultivating an atmosphere of mystery and romance that invites viewers into her visual world.
Liu harbors a profound fascination with the concept of memory, contemplating whether what we recall from the past corresponds to what actually transpired. She understands memory as a construct of subjective consciousness—one that registers emotions at a particular moment rather than documenting objective facts. Her paintings are at once condensed and illusory, merging imagined realms with personal sentiment to evoke stories that beckon viewers to connect with the raw, often vulnerable experiences depicted in each work.
Liu held her inaugural solo exhibition, Spring Fever, at Yiwei Gallery in Los Angeles in March 2023. Since then, her work has been presented at art fairs across Miami, New York, Palm Springs, Shanghai, and Beijing, including ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, Beijing Dangdai Art Fair, Future Fair, and Spring/Break Art Show.
Sunkyung Baek
Sunkyung Baek (b. 2000, Seoul, Korea) is a South Korean artist currently based in London. Working primarily in oil on canvas, she is presently undertaking an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, having completed her BFA at Hongik University, Seoul. She is the recipient of the 2026 Jackson's Art Prize People's Choice Award, and her work has been exhibited in Seoul and London.
Baek's practice explores contemporary society through images of water, flooding, and destabilised familiar spaces. She understands contemporary life as shaped by fluidity, flexibility, and mobility, employing flooding as a metaphor to examine how these conditions unsettle environments typically associated with safety—such as homes, cars, and rooms.
In her paintings, water operates as an uncontrollable external force: quiet, excessive, and persistent, entering and transforming these spaces. Rather than depicting dramatic catastrophe, Baek focuses on slower processes of accumulation and infiltration. Her work oscillates between submersion and aftermath, where traces of sediment, dampness, and residue remain and continue to shape space.
She views contemporary life as marked by the accumulation of information and images, excessive choice, and constant change, which together form a flood of uncertainty, anxiety, and fatigue. Baek captures suspended moments in which—like water seeping through the gap of a door—the boundaries between inside and outside, stability and instability, gradually dissolve.
Lee Jeongwoong
Lee Jeongwoong (b. 1982, Seoul, Korea) is a Korean artist who graduated from Sungkyungkwan University in 2008. He has exhibited extensively both in Korea and internationally, establishing himself as a distinctive voice in contemporary Korean art.
Lee's deliberate adoption of a Victorian-style painting vocabulary—into which he subtly integrates Korean symbols and details within classical Western techniques—renders his work at once visually sumptuous and culturally provocative. His paintings display an accomplished subtlety of execution: elegantly fluent brushwork, clear delineation of perspectival space, and evocative descriptions of light combine to produce captivating illusions. He is a skilled interpreter of colour and tonality, achieving an especially sensuous modelling of skin and fabric.
In Lee's compositions, mysterious figures are arranged within invented landscapes to create convincingly powerful narratives. He overtly addresses the problematic legacy of Japanese colonisation and its ongoing repercussions in modern Korea, while also exploring the conflict between modernity and tradition and Korea's complex ambivalence toward the West. These beautiful images embody a dynamic contradiction between harmonious appearance and turbulent content. The artist's profound engagement with questions of identity, historical memory, and cultural identity elevates his work beyond mere visual beauty, offering a deeply reflective commentary on the complex realities of contemporary Korean society.
Huang Tianyu
Huang Tianyu (b. 1993, Pujiang, Zhejiang, China) graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2016. He currently lives and works in Shanghai.
Huang Tianyu's artistic practice is built upon a perceptual structure that oscillates between the "inner" and the "outer." Through recurring motifs such as windows and the body, his work points toward the interface of seeing, while the use of symmetry, radiation, and encirclement explores the relationship between order and emergence. Within these images, the cycles of plants, the metamorphosis and flight of insects, and the spirals and enclosures of shells serve as temporal and formal codes of the nonhuman world—translated into the rhythmic structures of painting. The works are not narrative representations, but rather refinements and reconstructions of perceptual experience: a continuous state unfolding in the interstices, suspended between stillness and flow.
Huang's painting practice attends to the act of seeing itself, as well as the mediating space between the viewer and the viewed. Windows, as boundaries between interior and exterior spaces, and bodies, as both subjects and objects of perception, recur throughout his work as part of an ongoing investigation into the interfaces of vision. Through compositional strategies of symmetry, radiation, and encirclement, he establishes a productive tension between order and becoming. Forms drawn from nature—the growth cycles of plants, the metamorphosis and flight trajectories of insects, the spiral structures of shells—are distilled into formal codes that are translated into the distinctive rhythmic structures of his paintings.
His recent exhibitions include: 2026 "120 Days of Sodom", Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai, China; 2025 "Realm of the Unseen", Radius Gallery, Hangzhou, China; 2025 "Myriad Forms", WD ART SPACE, Shanghai, China, etc.
Opal Mae Ong
Opal Mae Ong (b. 1994, Los Angeles, CA) is a Filipino-American artist living and working on Lenapehoking in Brooklyn, New York. They hold an MFA in Painting from Hunter College (2021) and a BFA in Illustration and Cartooning from the School of Visual Arts (2016).
Ong's current body of work emerges from a felt response to the natural world and an innate reverence for the otherworldly. Drawing from lost ancestral knowledge, grief, and speculative visions, their paintings and drawings constitute a form of personal myth-making. The works present liminal landscapes where feminine figures crawl toward horizons, commune with flora, carry moons, shapeshift, or collapse from unrest. Materially, the works are built through layered drawing and pigment. Ong uses liquid pigments "with a history," sourced from Guerra Pigment & Paints, a local supplier known for salvaging rare and discontinued pigments. The paintings also incorporate gouache—long associated with draftsmanship—whose matte, hyper-saturated surfaces evoke both transparency and opacity, flattening and depth. Color shifts across bodies and environments, reflecting the artist's experience of mixed-race identity as relational rather than fixed. Figures blur into plants and land, dissolving the boundaries between self and world.
Within Filipino cosmologies, there are stories of human-like spirits that dwell within trees. Some, like the duwende, are small and elusive beings often associated with sacred trees, while others, like the kapre, are towering hairy tricksters said to inhabit large trees such as mangoes, banyans, and bamboo. In relation to these unseen presences, Filipinos commonly say tabi tabi po, which roughly translates to “excuse me,” when passing through nature or entering unfamiliar spaces. The phrase expresses respect toward what may exist beyond what is immediately visible, acknowledging that places are already inhabited and carry their own histories.
As someone who is mixed and Filipino American, I have been reflecting on what it means to carry these ways of seeing within the diaspora. I’ve been thinking about how an animistic worldview might exist alongside my experience of living in an increasingly urbanized place like New York City, a city often understood through its architecture and infrastructure, but one that is also shaped by layered histories, ecologies, migrations, and communities. These reflections feel alive and have been inspiring the current state of my practice and life.
Li Yichen
Li Yichen (b. 1996), is a Chinese sculptor and an intangible cultural heritage craftsperson. She holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London.
Her work has been exhibited at the Freud Museum London, X Museum, Chengdu Biennale, West Bund Art Center, The Crypt Gallery (London), and the Miettinen Collection (Germany), among other venues. In 2026, she was selected for "Kunst im Dialog," a Berlin-based artist residency jointly organized by GeKA (German-Chinese Cultural Exchange Foundation) and the Goethe-Institut China. That same year, she was also awarded a place in the Métiers d’Art Residency Programme, co-hosted by the Embassy of France in China and the Mobilier National. Her work is held in the collections of the LVMH Group, X Museum, Luo Zhongli Art Museum, and the Fengyuzhu Building. She was awarded Runner-up for Sculpture Design at the CHANEL Next Prize, presented by CHANEL headquarters in France, and was named a finalist for the Woodworker of the Year at the Heritage Crafts Awards, presented by Heritage Crafts (UK).
Li’s sculptural practice takes the screen as its central structure—yet the screen in her work is not a reproduction of a traditional object, but a condition suspended between partition and openness. It can shelter the body while allowing the outside world to enter in partial, fragmentary ways. Li does not understand subjectivity as a posture that must be publicly declared; instead, she places it within a more complex economy of visibility. She is concerned with how individuals locate themselves amid external gazes, social expectations, and self-protection. The screen thus becomes a structure of choice: it does not offer simple concealment, nor does it pursue total exposure; rather, it preserves a space that can be modulated between the two. For Li, whether or not one is seen is less important than whether the subject can determine the terms of her own entry into the relationship of looking and being looked at.
In her work, viewing is rarely accomplished from a single frontal position. The viewer must move, draw near, and readjust her position in order to apprehend the work through its partial openings. What appears closed from one angle may become an entry point from another; what seems concealed need not be fully revealed. In this way, Li transforms sculpture from a fixed object into a continuously shifting spatial relationship, fostering a slower, more embodied exchange between the body and the work. Her practice ultimately points toward a fragile yet vital right: the ability to determine how we are seen. In this sense, the screen is at once her sculptural language and a spatial allegory for feminine subjectivity locating its own position within the contemporary condition.
Curator
Wang Shiying
Wang Shiying, holds dual master's degrees from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Curating Contemporary Art program at the Royal College of Art in the UK, currently works in the Curatorial Department of Tang Contemporary Art. Her curatorial practice revolves around alternative exhibition, contemporary fluid, networked culture approaches to art. Exhibitions she has curated include: “Light in the Whirlpool” (2025), “Xiang Nan: Favoring Winds and the Promised Land” (2025), “Stemming from Umwelt” (2024), “Bangkok Holiday: Hao Zecheng & Wanpeng Dual Exhibitiion” (2024), “Frida Wannerberger Solo Exhibitiion: Into the Sunset with you”(2023), "Yangna Solo Exhibition: The Land of Ēse" (2023), “Group exhibition: The traces of light”(2023), "Indoor Weather" (2022), "Immunity Geography" (2021), the Gaswork "Awakening" online exhibition project(2021), and the "Post-Life" alternative space group exhibition at the Sweet Potato Community (2019), among others.