Under Heaven and Beyond Form: Celestial Tales of Tai Xiangzhou

Fu Qiumeng Fine Art is delighted to present our second solo exhibition with Tai Xiangzhou, Under Heaven and Beyond Form: Celestial Tales of Tai Xiangzhou. The exhibition brings together three significant series that span the artist’s career—Celestial Tales, Milky Way, and Kunlun—juxtaposed to form a sustained dialogue. Taking ink as its conceptual and material foundation, the exhibition systematically traces Tai’s artistic inquiry into cosmological thought, material elements, and pictorial traditions, articulating his sustained engagement with the transformation of ink painting in a contemporary context. The exhibition will be on view from January 3 to February 21, 2026, at 65 East 80th Street. 

Rooted in ancient Chinese cosmology and the historiography of landscape painting (shan shui), Tai Xiangzhou’s practice engages in parallel with contemporary scientific discourse. Rather than pursuing a mimetic representation of the natural world, Tai interrogates the internal pictorial structures, spatial logic, and metaphysical principles that underlie the Chinese landscape tradition, using them as a framework through which to articulate an understanding of cosmic order. Through three closely related series, the exhibition unfolds as a cumulative and stratified viewing experience. 

In this series, Tai enacts a deliberate shift in pictorial hierarchy: water supplants mountain as the primary structuring element of the image. Drawing upon the Southern Song lineage of Ma Yuan and Xia Gui, particularly their treatment of water and negative space, Tai subjects these historical brush conventions to a process of abstraction. Waterfalls emerge from indeterminate sources or suspended rock formations, traversing void-like pictorial spaces and converging into riverine and stellar configurations. Here, water is no longer a descriptive motif tied to a specific landscape, but functions as an organizing principle that articulates spatial continuity, temporality, and movement within the pictorial field.