Tang Contemporary is proud to present the group exhibition “August in Bloom,” featuring 10 internationally acclaimed artists: Ai Weiwei, Jonas Burgert, Mao Xuhui, Yue Minjun, Xiyao Wang, Edgar Plans, Woo Kukwon, Rodel Tapaya, Kitti Narod and Gongkan. Through the lens of "light," the exhibition investigates its multifaceted symbolism in contemporary society, culture, and the realm of personal experience. August’s radiance blooms not only in the natural world but also in the mind—a luminous projection. Through their own prisms, the artists reveal light’s dual nature: a wellspring of hope and energy, yet also a heat that burns, a flicker that slips into shadow. “August in Bloom” invites both visual and philosophical conversation and reflection on nature, time, and our shared human experience.

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Ai Weiwei’s works cut like hard light through gloom. Now living in Europe, he maps the lights and shadows of geopolitics across multi-media. Like a prism, his art refracts the ruptures and recompositions of the information age. In the exhibited work, Zodiac Dragon, shards of personal memory and collective history are embedded within fields of color that appear strictly ordered. In his hands, each Lego unit becomes a particle of light, forming new symbolic architectures as they join and fall apart—at once a countermelody to the standardized optics of the digital era and a steady gaze toward the faint glimmers within dispersed identities. Using Lego as his vessel, Ai entwines the physicality of light with its charge as a sign, casting a border-crossing, poetic radiance into the fissure between a child’s toy and an adult’s narrative.

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Jonas Burgert’s paintings stage a clear drama, with saturated colours set against deep shadow, with figures in eccentric dress held in tense arrangements. Trained at the Berlin University of the Arts, he shapes existential fables through Renaissance style, grand compositions and eccentric figures. He uses light as both a searchlight for truth and a filter for illusions, inviting us to inspect the twilight zone off canvas. German art critics stated that his colours celebrates the balance of memory and imagination, like wandering in between the summer sun and the starry night.

 

Mao Xuhui turns ordinary objects into conduits of mental light. Forged by the radical years of the Southwest Art Group, the Kunming artist redirects a critique of power into a quieter, attentive gaze. In his hands, everyday things become emblems touched by a theological glow, tracing a shift from the red soil of Guishan to an inward radiance.

 

Yue Minjun’s grin, under harsh light, develops into sheer absurdity. A central voice of Cynical Realism, his endlessly laughing doubles are both the consumer age’s blinding dazzle and the stark exposure that lays its illusions bare. Flowers are symbols of beauty that could be likened to a plant’s smiling face. Here, exquisite flowers replace the smiling faces of the past and seductively bloom in front of figures’ faces.

 

Xiyao Wang’s abstractions tremble with the effort of catching light. Moving between Berlin and Chengdu, she layers oil paint and chalk into strokes that resembles Asian calligraphy yet spark with the chromatic clashes of German Expressionism. From these crossings forms a restless tornado of light slipping off the canvas, charting a cross‑cultural journey of the mind. Liang Xiao Yin No.2 captures light breathing through time with a supple, ever-shifting touch, as if the canvas itself were coursing with the summer night’s warmth and haze. She renders light as a gentle presence—one that illumines the instant while veiling the traces of its passing. Color and line whisper between the seen and the unseen, not merely arranging a visual field but contemplating the delicate bond between the momentary and the eternal. The whole work is steeped in a hush of depth and stillness, as though time has paused here, inviting us into a nocturne of inward reflection.

 

Edgar Plans is famed for his playful “little heroes” works suffused with a dazzling aura of innocence. The Spanish artist wields neon-bright color and uninhibited line, turning light itself into a metaphor for creativity. On his canvases, light is more than a visual effect—it is a rule-breaking force of imagination, illuminating the blurred frontier between art and popular culture.​

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In Woo Kukwon’s paintings, light is both a balm for the spirit and a conduit to memories buried in the subconscious. He often conjures a festive air with cartoon-bright palettes and fluorescent hues, yet an undercurrent of tension mirrors light’s doubleness—radiant and cheerful on the surface, harboring peril beneath. So it is in this exhibition’s Tick‑Tock the Crocodile,  where a colossal crocodile slips out of Peter Pan, the beast that swallowed Captain Hook’s ticking clock lures us into an imaginary realm. Thick, sculptural paint lends his works dimensionality and a restless, living presence. Foregrounding materiality, he meticulously reconstructs objects into charged emblems of intent. Woo nudges us to weigh life against death, letting the tick become both heartbeat and warning.

 

Rodel Tapaya invites the fairy‑light of Filipino folktales into the present, rekindling myths tempered by the colonial era. His canvases glow with beasts, they are carriers of memory whose quiet radiance gently resists the glare of modernity.

 

Kitti Narod evokes Thai everyday life like sunlight shimmering through palm leaves. With meticulous handling of flat, two‑dimensional colour, the bustle of modern life softens into a calm rhythm. He composes a tender utopia of light, a quiet reminder of everyday joys in the long shadow of the digital age.

 

Gongkan turns light into a gentle, reflective language. With delicate brushstrokes, the Thai artist gathers light’s quiet flow, painting daily life into a lucid dream. His figures bathe in the dim warmth of the sun, summer held still and time slowed to a hush, revealing light as an emotional vessel and a tender force of healing.

 

Light, one of the most primal elements, has guided the visual and spiritual lineages of civilization from the beginning. In science, it is an electromagnetic wave; in theology and philosophy, a symbol of enlightenment and the sacred; in contemporary art, it becomes medium, motif, and instrument of critique.“August in Bloom” is no mere celebration of summer’s radiance. It invites us into light’s paradox—how it nurtures and scorches, reveals and conceals. Through the distinct vocabularies of 10 artists, the exhibition co‑creates a terrain between the seen and the unseen, the enduring and the fleeting. In an age of climate peril and digital estrangement, the question of light grows ever more urgent. Art may yet offer a way to look again. Across cultures, “August in Bloom” extends a conversation about how light is sensed, deconstructed, and remade.