When Clouds are Floating White as Swans: Jinbin Chen
Hua International is pleased to present When Clouds are Floating White as Swans, Jinbin Chen's first solo exhibition with the gallery.
The title is taken from the opening line of a poem by the Latvian poet Eduards Veidenbaums (1867–1892), whose verses begin in romantic longing, clouds like swans, roses that never decay, before turning sharply on themselves: "Chuck your hope into the dark of the grave / We'll never stroll in those sunny parts / In a tear-drenched swamp we live and slave." The movement from romantic escape to the acknowledgement of a brutal real is also the movement of Chen's exhibition. His works hold both impulses without resolving them: "All my works carry softness, but there is also alienation in them. I want the exhibition to become something in between or wandering between them."
The closest visual precedent for Chen's painted surface is not in modernism but in the Fayum mummy portraits produced in Roman Egypt between the first and fourth centuries CE: panel paintings in encaustic or tempera placed over the faces of the dead, in which figures emerge from flat, monochrome grounds with no depicted space behind them. The flesh is modeled carefully, with real volume, but in colors that are subtly wrong: too cool, too warm, tinted according to convention rather than observation. Color here is attribute rather than description. Chen's figures have the same quality: bodies in lavender and rose rendered with smooth, unbroken surfaces against abstract blue-grey fields, present and suspended at the same time. This is not the non-naturalistic color of Gauguin, which announces a break with European convention. It announces a continuity with an older one, a tradition in which idealized figures carry symbolic meaning precisely because they are not anchored to a specific body, a specific light, a specific place. The Fayum portraits were themselves the product of a multicultural moment: Greek artistic method, Egyptian funerary ritual, Roman imperial society, three traditions held in a single image without any one of them fully dominating. Chen, working between Oslo and Beijing, drawing simultaneously on Greco-Roman gesture, Tang-dynasty Buddhist iconography, and European art history, is working in this same mode: not between cultures as a problem to be solved, but as a condition that produces images unavailable to any single tradition alone.
The painting that gives the exhibition its title concentrates this method. A barefoot boy in a billowing translucent shirt holds a swan wrapped in fabric; the image is still, pale, tender. Its palette of milky yellow, white, and soft blue asks for a gentle reading. The sources that gather behind it are not gentle. The poem whose title it borrows ends in a swamp of blood and sweat. The fairytales it recalls are equally dark: in Andersen's The Wild Swans, princes are transformed into birds by a curse; in Hauff's Little Longnose, a boy is transformed into a hunchback by a witch and condemned to carry a goose; the Brothers Grimm's The Golden Goose turns on greed and the body made grotesque. In each case a boy and a bird are bound together by something violent and irreversible. Beneath all of these sits the Hellenistic bronze type of the Boy Strangling the Goose, a sculpture whose interpretation belongs to the same Roman Egyptian cultural matrix as the Fayum portraits: the bird is a chenalopex, an Egyptian goose sacred to Amun and associated in hieroglyphic usage with both erotic energy and evil spirits; the boy has been read as the Divine Child Dionysos or Harpokrates subduing a dangerous force. The image of a child strangling an aquatic bird with his bare hands is profoundly uncomfortable. Chen's painting holds all of that discomfort inside a pastel register that aestheticises without resolving it. The violence is present and it is hidden at the same time.
This principle organises the whole exhibition. In Wandering Alix (2026), oil and acrylic on a hand-sewn canvas mattress cover, a young man reclines on a sofa in blue swimming shorts, his body in rose and lavender against soft green pillows. He takes the pose of the mutilated Frankish princes in Luminais's Sons of Clovis II (1880), whose tendons were severed by their mother before they were set adrift. The heroic-tragic body becomes a body at rest on domestic textile. In Adlocutio, the right hand rises in the Roman gesture of imperial oration, legible on coins of Caligula and on the Augustus of Prima Porta. In Hiketeia, a figure folds inward in the Greek ritual of supplication, the weaker body embracing the knees of the powerful. These are what Aby Warburg called Pathosformeln: emotional formulas that survive across centuries by migrating from one body to another. Chen's flat, iconic figures are precisely what enables this migration. A naturalistically rendered body is anchored to a specific time and place; a body rendered as Chen renders them, smooth, idealized, held within clean contours and attributed color, can absorb a gesture from Roman statuary, a pose from nineteenth-century French history painting, a silhouette from Tang-dynasty Buddhist iconography, without collapsing into the illustration of any one of them.
Around these gestures gather scenes of confrontation and love, figures androgynous and racially indeterminate, themes held open rather than resolved. "The exhibition space will function as an environment created as a spectrum," Chen has written, "allowing various themes to come together organically, creating entrances and space for the audience to bring their own associations." What the paintings offer is not a statement but a temperature: somewhere between the swan-clouds of the poem's first stanza and the swamp of its last, wandering.
Jinbin Chen (b. 1994, Guangdong) lives and works between Oslo and Beijing.
