AS WOVEN
20-24 March
Hongshan Feng
Curated by:
Ziyan Xu
Hongshan Feng is an artist of Chinese origin based between New York and Hangzhou. Working across painting and ceramics, her practice is deeply informed by her formation in fashion design, drawing from the complex textures and structural logics embedded in weaving and textile construction. Born in a city of ancient landscapes and layered architectures, Hongshan's earliest encounters with material were encountered brick by brick — each surface a threshold to accumulated desire. Her works bear the marks of lacquer, ink, and fired clay. Drawing from her travels and field observations, Feng translates vessels, books, totems, flora, and mythological creatures long embedded in the Chinese poetic imagination into her own visual language, reconstructing them brick by brick into new forms that invite viewers’ interpretation.
Hongshan’s paintings operate as looms: ink and oil paint are sutured together, the dark linearity of ink serving as warp, the fatty bloom of oil as weft, and the accumulation of mark-making as stitch. She does not appropriate the surfaces of traditional architecture but rather excavates their inner structural logics — the proportional relationships, spatial rhythms, and stratified orders embedded within the roof tiles of Shanxi, the timber frames of Xi’an, and the masonry of Anhui. These interwoven traces do not represent any external referent; they are themselves evidence of labour.
Her ceramic practice turns its attention to process over resolution. Clay is subjected to compression, extension, and deformation, acquiring a fragile tenacity through the kiln — as though enacting a specifically feminine experience of time: cyclic, waiting, non-linear, and fractured.
Hongshan’s work refuses the reduction to exotic cultural ornament. Each successive layer of paint, each kneading of clay, constitutes a response — a response to those forms of women’s labour written out of history; to those repeated gestures — weaving, sewing, shaping — never permitted to accede to the status of philosophy. Between warp and weft, her hands weave structure into every thread, until it becomes an armature—an underlying script that continues to be written through the work.
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Hongshan Feng
(b. 2004, Hangzhou, China) lives and works in New York City. She is currently majoring in Fashion Design at Parsons School of Design. Hongshan’s practice operates between cultural memory and contemporary visual language. Influenced by both Eastern visual traditions and Western systems of representation, her work integrates painting, traditional media, architecture, textile, and sculptural forms, translating historical experience into contemporary material practice and spatial narratives.
Working across fashion, sculpture, painting, and mixed media, Hongshan examines how cultural knowledge is carried, transformed, and reinterpreted over time, with particular attention to its relationship to contemporary social identity and lived experience. Rather than positioning tradition as a fixed or regional identity, she approaches it as a fluid framework—one shaped by migration, translation, and the conditions of the present.
From a female perspective, Hongshan reflects on questions of identity, inheritance, and authorship, exploring how personal memory intersects with collective history. By weaving together materials and visual languages from different cultural systems, her work proposes a contemporary dialogue that resists singular categorization and invites viewers to reconsider how culture is continuously constructed and reimagined in response to current social realities.
Ziyan Xu
Ziyan Xu is a curator, gallerist, and the founder of Whiteshepherd Gallery. Having grown up painting and trained formally in fine art, she later pursued an MA in Curating and Collections at University of the Arts London — a transition that sharpened her understanding of what it means to move between the world of making and the world of framing: how context shapes meaning, and how institutional structures determine whose work is seen, and where. It is this dual literacy — as someone who has inhabited both sides — that defines her curatorial perspective.
Rooted in her own experience as someone who belongs fully to neither China nor London, her practice is built around the artists who occupy similar in-between spaces: cross-cultural practitioners, particularly those from Asia, navigating diaspora, displacement, and the negotiation of identity across borders. Over five years, she has developed an independent curatorial model that gives these artists professional infrastructure at the earliest stages of their careers — a contribution that addresses a structural gap within the UK's contemporary art ecology, where such support for international emerging artists remains scarce.
She resists being called a cultural bridge — a bridge, she argues, is passive, implying equal passage where none exists. She speaks instead of "effective friction": the deliberate refusal to smooth over the real asymmetries of power, language, and market that shape how art moves between cultures. Alongside her work in London, she continues as long-term curator at XIMA Gallery in Hangzhou, enabling sustained exchange between British and Chinese contemporary art communities. In the post-Brexit landscape, where international cultural relationships require active, independent stewardship, her practice offers a working model for what meaningful cross-cultural contribution looks like — not as institutional gesture, but as daily curatorial labour.
THE EXHIBITION IS A COLLABORATION WITH :
Whiteshepherd is a London-based nomadic gallery and curatorial platform, founded on the belief that the most urgent conversations in contemporary art happen at the edges — between cultures, between languages, between structures of power that rarely acknowledge one another. We began in a century-old townhouse in South Kensington, and have since expanded across multiple venues in London. This mobility is not incidental. It reflects a curatorial position: that art, particularly art made by those navigating diaspora, displacement, and cross-cultural identity, cannot be contained within a single room.
We work with emerging artists whose practices resist easy categorisation — artists who push back against inherited structures of gender, cultural representation, and institutional authority. In practice, this means working with rising artists from the earliest stages: building their first exhibition concepts, developing sustainable commercial frameworks, and creating the conditions for their work to be seen and understood across cultural contexts. Through established partnerships with artists in London, we bring work into dialogue with Chinese audiences via exhibitions, residencies, and art fairs — in close collaboration with XIMA Gallery, which operates three spaces in China. Together, we do not seek to build a bridge between East and West — a bridge implies symmetry that does not exist. We seek instead to create the conditions for effective friction: moments where different aesthetic frameworks, viewing habits, and critical languages meet without being prematurely resolved.
We believe that cross-cultural exchange is not a gesture of goodwill. It is a practice that requires sustained attention to power, context, and the specific histories that artists carry with them. We work within the structures of the art market with open eyes, refusing to let those structures determine what is deserving of showing, or who is entitled to seeing.