This exhibition is structured as “theatre”, and centered on the idea of “play”. It unfolds in four sections. In the Prologue, the grammar of Chinese landscape painting is translated into a LEGO®-based visual order, establishing the rules of this world. In the Scenes, the traveler moves through shifting landscapes, wandering across time and space. In the Open Rehearsal, viewers are brought behind the stage. Over the course of a week, the artist works on-site, and the making of a distinctly “Zhang Xiaoli” work gradually comes into view. . In the final act, Into the Play, LEGO® bricks are placed in your hands. The moment you begin to assemble, you become part of the story.
Zhang Xiaoli
Le Garden Manual 乐园画谱, 2025-2026
Ink on paper 水墨纸本
17 3/4 x 13 3/4 in x 2; 45 x 35 cm x 2
Prologue
This world has its own language. Learning after Facsimileing II functions as a bilingual dictionary, while Le Garden Manual serves as its grammar. Drawing on the Qing-dynasty Mustard Seed Garden Manual, the artist reconstructs the rules of landscape painting through the logic of LEGO®, inventing a linguistic system she calls “ LEGO®-script.” Playful and disarming, these visual signs loosen the authority of the original manual, allowing a new language in this theater to emerge.
Zhang Xiaoli
Learning after Shenzhou's Famous Scenic Views of the Two Rivers 致敬沈周两江盛景图册 II, 2025-2026
Ink and color on paper 水墨设色纸本
25 5/8 x 15 3/4 in; 65 x 40 cm
Selected from a set of ten (three shown)
Scenes
With the rules set, scenes unfold. Following the traveller's footsteps to the banks of the Yangtze and Huai rivers, Learning after Shenzhou's Famous Scenic Views of the Two Rivers restages Shen Zhou's Ming-dynasty album leaves like jump-cut scenes on a rotating stage. Notes on Painting the Yuntai Mountain reaches further back, to Gu Kaizhi's ancient written vision for a landscape scroll. Xiaoli draws her visual vocabulary from mountain forms spanning the Wei-Jin to early Tang periods, finding her way through the silence the text left behind. The tradition of landscape painting is permeated with countless classical subjects that have been continually revived and reshaped by artists across the centuries. For more than a millennium, each artist’s response has been a restaging of the same “script” within a theater of his or her own.
As the traveller moves beyond mountains and rivers. Waters of Spring and Three Realms open onto a different scale. In Waters of Spring, landscape turns toward abstraction: rocks condense into crystalline forms, water flows as warm, winding lines. Layers of mineral pigment and gold powder settle into the translucency of silk, producing a soft haze, as if the world has not yet fully taken shape. Here, there is no classical model to follow. What takes its place is an attention to underlying order : branches that echo blood vessels, mycelium, nerve endings—forms that seem unrelated share a deeper logic of growth.
Open Rehearsal
A “cyber stage” enables another kind of dialogue across time. In works involving AI, traditional landscape painting and Zhang Xiaoli’s personal visual language are reimagined through contemporary technology. She feeds her earlier works into a system, generating images through recombination, then selects, revises, and reconstructs them. Although the results turned out resemble her style, their internal logic often slips and fractures. She describes the process as a conversation with someone intoxicated, language that seems coherent at first, yet ultimately fails to hold together.. Her task is to reorganize these “drunken” fragments into images that cohere. This method disrupts her usual compositional control; randomness and disorder open up a different kind of freedom. Magnolia, Pine, and Lotus take shape through this process. As the AI enters the act of making, the boundaries of authorship begin to blur. Within this theater, a question lingers: who, in the end, is performing this play?
© image courtesy of the Wallpaper Magazine.
Into the Play
Lights fade, mountains dissolve their edges. The stage continues to shift. You were the viewer, and the traveller. Into the Play, as the bricks fall into your hands, the rules restart with you.
The theater does not close. The story continues.
