WENHUI HAO

By the Rivers Dark

Opening: Wednesday, June 11th, 2025

June 11th - July 9th, 2025

From a speech at The New School in 1949, Willem de Kooning stated that “subject matter in the abstract is space.” The artist “fills it with an attitude.” And that attitude never comes from the artist alone. Here de Kooning is talking about conditions, circumstances, customs and the breaking of traditions. Interesting that he cites attitude as the alchemy we witness on canvas - not oil or acrylic or pastel. 

Wenhui Hao is insatiable when it comes to imagery. She is obsessed with the accumulation of layered paint, the visceral eye touch such a build up reveals. This tactile aspect, she says, brings personal pleasure. And so setting this physical state against a backdrop of an R.C.A. graduate degree and her own cultural heritage growing up in Taiyuan, China, creates a stark contrast of reference points. Filtration can be attitude, what gets caught in the sifter of our imagination and what slips through, made anew. 

“In the painting ‘Dionysus,’ I depict a heavy river suspended mid-air before crashing down violently, its splashing waves resembling a translucent Milky Way,” explains Hao. “The faintly lit space behind is blurred—dim, tranquil, and profound—evoking the ‘Water Curtain Cave’ or ‘Land of Peach Blossoms’ from classical Chinese literature, an untouchable sublime. The river, dotted with floating shards of ice, glows ever-so-slightly in the abyssal darkness, while the ecstatic, spasming nude torsos flicker in and out of view.” 

“By the Rivers Dark” is Wenhui Hao’s debut exhibition in New York City on the heels of her presentation with Latitude Gallery at Untitled last December in Miami Beach. She lives and works in London.