Di Long (Julia)
Park: Instant Gratification
Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing
31 October - 12 December 2026

Press release

Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to present Park: Instant Gratification, a solo exhibition by Long Di, on view at the gallery’s Beijing space from October 31 to December 12, 2026.

Bringing together nearly 20 oil paintings and more than 30 watercolor on paper works, the exhibition features works predominantly created in 2026. Following her solo exhibitions at BAO ROOM by BAO ART FOUNDATION in Shanghai in December 2024 and at the gallery’s London space in June 2024, where she explored female roles and narratives of identity, in this coming solo exhibition, the artist further delves into themes and memories that have motivated her practice. While continuing to examine her earlier subjects through painting and drawing, this time she draws connections between memory and space, personal emotions and experiences, and collective history.

Before she entered primary school, Long Di spent much of her time with her maternal grandparents. By then, her grandparents worked at the Chongqing Museum when it was located on Pipa Mountain in Yuzhong District, adjacent to Pipa Mountain Park—a former private garden known as Wang Yuan, once belonging to Kuomintang general Wang Lingji. She visited the park and museum almost daily with her grandparents, and she loved listening them recounting both Chinese history and their own life stories. These childhood routines gave her an burgeorning elementary understanding of the world and of history: the world is vast; it contains countless parks and museums; the individual is small; and human history occupies no more than a fleeting moment in the life of the Earth and the universe. Even as a child, Long Di understood that parks and museums were places worth returning to, capable of revealing something new with every visit. As everything grows and changes from moment to moment, so too has her curiosity about the world and its history continued to deepen.


In this exhibition, the park carries multiple meanings, which is about the concrete literal park and the abstract park beyond it's gates and walls. First parks are limited spaces of respite, offering a temporary reprieve from urban life. Long Di is drawn to parks with histories of their own, particularly those containing objects, places, or stories that resonate with her personal memories and emotions. In her paintings, she brings together and juxtaposes elements from parks she has known and loved—including Pipa Mountain Park, Beihai Park, and Central Park—assembling people, animals, plants, landscapes, and other presences that seemed most naturally belonging to a park. People exercise and take photographs; others embrace trees. Cats and fish inhabit the grounds, while an escaped owl finds companions of its own. Stone lions come alive, in both male and female forms.

Drawn from fragments of memorable park scenes, these images transform the park into an abstract vessel of memory, one that holds holding private histories alongside public ones. A visit to the park becomes an act of instant gratification, unbound by the constraints of time and geography. Moving through this imagined landscape, disparate collective histories and personal memories converge, setting the artist’s thoughts and recollections in motion.

In China, the idea of the modern park as a space for public enjoyment gradually took shape around the transition from late Qing Dynasty to the early Republican era. Amid profound historical upheavals and shifting social and cultural movements, historic Chinese gardens and parks underwent a transformation, evolving from private retreats belonging to the imperial court, literati, and wealthy merchants into spaces increasingly accessible to the public. From a time when men and women were admitted to parks at different hours to the eventual opening of these spaces to both sexes, the emergence of the modern park coincided with that of the New Women. Parks became favored destinations for women, offering spaces for leisure, socializing, and recreation in relative safety. In the works presented here, women inhabit parks with the same ease and self-possession they display in gym locker rooms and public bathhouses: relaxing, enjoying their own company, playing, resting, or exchanging gossip. The exhibition also features works in which goddesses engage in acts of playful defiance, bringing mythological narratives as responses to contemporary culture. The exhibition poster, inspired by Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Picnic on the Grass), depicts the Greek goddesses Calypso and Circe, beautiful and unapologetically proud. Reclining on the grass alongside lions, they lounge and drink with expressions of disdain.

As an everyday urban pursuit, visiting a park is also a modest act of rebellion against the excessive valorization of hardship, endurance, stoicism, and delayed gratification in Chinese and East Asian cultures. By the same logic, anything capable of offering immediate pleasure may become the equivalent of a visit to the park. Adopt the mindset of a park-goer, and all sorts of things begin to reveal themselves as sources of enlighenting pleasure.

Also on view for the first time is a selection of Buddha and Bodhisattva drawings by the artist in response to the visual traditions of Chinese Buddhist sculpture. For the artist, the Buddhist saying “Let the mind arise without abiding anywhere”—from the Diamond Sutra—has long offered a way of understanding letting go as another, more inward form of instant gratification. The present exhibition, for instance, came together on a relatively short timeline, with only five months of preparation, allowing the artist to explore just one facet of the park as a subject. Once she relinquished the expectation of producing an exhaustive and definitive investigation in a single exhibition, new possibilities began to emerge. For Long Di, history is a park; books are parks; museums are parks; and the studio, too, is a park—a place where learning, making, and play find their purpose. Each remains an inexhaustible terrain for continued exploration.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Julia Long, based in Beijing and born into a three-generation artistic family, is a boundary-breaking artist who explores her unique path beyond the conventional contemporary art career framework. She earned top honors with a bachelor's degree in world history from Nankai University and completed a master’s in American history (specializing in gender history) at Georgia University with a full scholarship. Later, she moved to New York, working as a restaurant publicist while engaging in art-making, magazine writing, illustration, translation, and podcast hosting.

Since 2017, Julia Long has lived in Beijing and become an artist, exhibiting in solo shows at Tabula Rasa Gallery in Beijing and London. In November 2024, her first institutional exhibition, Imaginary Girlfriend and Guardian Spirit: Rebellion and Freedom in Performative Narratives, opens at Bao Room by Bao Foundation in Shanghai. Her work, rooted in feminist, gender, and pop-cultural themes through translations and writings, merges her academic background with personal insights, offering a cross cultural perspective. Her interests extend further into geopolitical history, cultural shifts, human-animal relationships, and the symbolic power of natural history, creating a multifaceted discourse on contemporary identity.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Park: Instant Gratification, Tabula Rasa Gallery (2026, Beijing); Everything and Every Moment is Spirited Series Collection Cards, Artist * ART021 2025 Shanghai (Shanghai, 2025); Imaginary Girlfriends & Guardian Angles, with Tabula Rasa Gallery & Bao Room by BAO FOUNDATION (Shanghai 2024); Running Up That Hill, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London, 2024); Provisional Emotions, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2021); Meanwhile, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2019); One Eighth of the Narrative, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2017); Serendipity, UNdefine (Shanghai, 2014); Selected group shows include: Art Basel Hong Kong, Tabula Rasa Gallery, (Hong Kong, 2026); Under the Stars: Commemorating Under the Stars: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s Passing, Goethe-Institut China,(Beijing, 2025); Nián Nián: The Power and Agency of Animal Forms (Deji Museum, 2023); Home Sweet Home, Power Station of Art (Shanghai 2017).

Publication: Provisional Emotions, Distracted, an essay collection (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2021) Selected translation publication include: Joan Didion's two Paris Review interviews (The Art of Fiction No.71, and The Art of Non-fiction No. 1) ; Hilary Mantel, Paris Review interview (The Art of Fiction, No. 226), Chinese version published in 2020. Patti Smith, Devotion (Why I Write), (Yale University Press, 2017), Chinese version published in 2021.