D Contemporary is pleased to announce that gallery artist Sun Xiaolan will take part in ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair with Tender Archives (柔态纪事), a solo presentation brought to the fair by collaborating galleries Whiteshepherd Gallery and XIMA Gallery. The presentation runs 11–14 November 2026 at Booth E27, Shanghai Exhibition Center, and is curated by Ziyan Xu.

Tender Archives brings together oil paintings on canvas, oil pastels on wood panel and ceramics made between 2023 and 2026. The ripples, light and waterbirds of West Lake run through every work. Together they extend Sun Xiaolan´s practice of a contemporary Eastern emotional Impressionism that uses water as its visual method. The presentation pairs two bodies of work: the liquid state of water and the solid state of clay. The paintings sense through sight what vanishes in flux; the ceramics reshape earth by hand into forms that can be held. The curatorial frame reads this archive, begun on the surface of West Lake, as a point of entry into ecofeminist discourse.

At the centre is the Water Drop series, in which the concentric ripples of a drop striking water are recorded on canvas with seismographic precision. The works draw on Luce Irigaray´s idea of fluidity as what exceeds any fixed form, and on Astrida Neimani´s Hydrofeminism, which holds that we are all bodies of water. The ceramics move the viewer from looking to walking around: each vessel has no single vantage point and must be circled to be seen whole.

“Perhaps after seeing the paintings, when people pass a lake or a river, they will linger a moment longer, look at the play of light on the water, and see that poetry still exists within impermanence.”

About Sun Xiaolan

Sun Xiaolan was born in Haining, Zhejiang, and studied and lives in Hangzhou, where her studio sits beside West Lake. Years of watching the lake turned concentric ripples, left by light, waterbirds, wind and rain, into the core motif of her work. Oil painting is her principal medium; in recent years she has carried her language of ripples into ceramics. Her plants come from sketching at West Lake, Tianmuli and periods abroad, rendered in free, cursive-script brushwork. A recurring surreal pink horse opens a quiet space within the everyday.