Lena · Solo exhibition
Rough and real.
In pursuit of freedom.
A Shanghai painter who works fast and loud — figures, cats and half-remembered scenes lifted from film and daily life, then half-handed back to the paint itself. Roaming in the Paracosm gathers fifteen canvases and a clutter of cat sculptures from her 2024 solo show.
Enter the showThe work
Born in 2000, Lena paints with the restlessness of her generation — bold, fluid strokes and a loose, almost reckless use of thinner that lets pigment run until figuration slides toward abstraction.
Photographs and film stills are collaged, dissected and re-staged — not rearranged so much as anatomised, then handed back as image. Slogans surface in the paint, deliberately misspelled or broken apart, scattered across the canvas like off-screen subtitles to the scene.
“My work is how I watch the things of this era — and think them through on my own terms.” — Lena
Selected works
All works (19) →Three rooms to wander
Wildmen · Film · Animals
Wildmen
Figures stripped back to something rawer — an attempt at the more honest, freer relationships people might have with one another.
Film
Scenes lifted from cinema and collaged with the artist’s own reading of the story, until the borrowed image becomes hers.
Animals
Cats and creatures painted for their spirit as much as their shape, each carrying a small narrative of its own.