Floating Light
Solo show
Long Quan
Tabula Rasa Gallery Beijing
15 February – 15 March 2025
Solo show
Long Quan
Tabula Rasa Gallery Beijing
15 February – 15 March 2025
Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to announce that Long Quan's solo exhibition, Floating Light, will open at Tabula Rasa Gallery's Beijing Space on February 15, 2025, and we invited writer Zhang Chen to write articles for the exhibition.
Long Quan has created many works featuring water, where the form of the water’s surface shapes the entire composition. In this context, Long Quan’s floating light echoes Ma Yuan’s Water Map across time. However, just as Monet’s water lilies were not the true subject of his paintings, water itself is not the central theme in Long Quan’s work. In the artist’s own words, he paints fleeting light—the shifting play of light and shadow on the water’s surface. These variations are rooted in his exploration of the language of painting, emerging through the traces of pigments, lines, and brushstrokes.
Long Quan’s images originate from photographs, but as these references are cropped, processed, and magnified, specific details—whether from the Pacific or the Atlantic—fade into the near-abstract flow of ripples. Representational elements decompose into lines; broad landscapes fragment into microscopic currents. At the blurry intersection between figuration and abstraction, we realize that the reality of an image is nothing more than the subjective construction of visual perception. At the edges of each water surface, layer upon layer, what we encounter is the density of Long Quan’s practice—a condensation of his entire understanding of painting.
Long Quan’s work depict the fleeting impression of a passing moment and the suspended motion embedded within the painting’s structure. Through the depiction of such movement, Long Quan infuses painting with vitality, allowing the art form to grow and evolve, permeating the rippling surface of water, endlessly reflecting the mesmerizing shifts of floating light.
At the blurry intersection between figuration and abstraction, we realize that the reality of an image is nothing more than the subjective construction of visual perception. Unlike the discourse of artistic autonomy from social and political contexts, Long Quan’s works reveal, beneath their formal clarity, subtle traces of the artist’s emotional landscape and his profound engagement with contemporary life. Just as the term floating light captures the transient social reality: The experience of time as ‘the past flows like this,’ the dialectic between eternity and the present moment, change and permanence, the danger of the flatness and imbalance of the water’s surface, the aimless wandering and endless inward spiral, all pointing to an uncertain and unknown future... The artist, in this way, encapsulates our lives—so full of density—onto the material surface of the canvas, silently hanging them on the wall.
Text by Zhang Chen
About the Artist
LONG Quan (b. 1956, Chongqing, China) holds both a BA and an MA from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China. He has recently held solo exhibitions at Tabula Rasa Gallery in Beijing, James Fuentes Gallery in New York, and YIMA Gallery in Chengdu. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at prestigious institutions, including the National Art Museum of China, the Yuan Art Center, and the Capital Museum in Beijing. He has served as a professor in the Department of Painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and as the Dean of the School of Art and Design at Beihang University in Beijing.
LONG's minimalist, almost naïveté approach to landscape painting emphasises a stark, structural form. With restrained brushstrokes and a controlled palette, he attempts to capture the ephemeral, even elusive state between movement and stillness in nature. In his paintings, mountains, rocks, trees, water, and clouds grow naturally in a slow, deliberate manner, dissolving the immediate urgency that typically defines our relationship with external images. His work offers a calm dignity, achieved through a lucid merging of closeness and remoteness.
Long Quan has created many works featuring water, where the form of the water’s surface shapes the entire composition. In this context, Long Quan’s floating light echoes Ma Yuan’s Water Map across time. However, just as Monet’s water lilies were not the true subject of his paintings, water itself is not the central theme in Long Quan’s work. In the artist’s own words, he paints fleeting light—the shifting play of light and shadow on the water’s surface. These variations are rooted in his exploration of the language of painting, emerging through the traces of pigments, lines, and brushstrokes.
Long Quan’s images originate from photographs, but as these references are cropped, processed, and magnified, specific details—whether from the Pacific or the Atlantic—fade into the near-abstract flow of ripples. Representational elements decompose into lines; broad landscapes fragment into microscopic currents. At the blurry intersection between figuration and abstraction, we realize that the reality of an image is nothing more than the subjective construction of visual perception. At the edges of each water surface, layer upon layer, what we encounter is the density of Long Quan’s practice—a condensation of his entire understanding of painting.
Long Quan’s work depict the fleeting impression of a passing moment and the suspended motion embedded within the painting’s structure. Through the depiction of such movement, Long Quan infuses painting with vitality, allowing the art form to grow and evolve, permeating the rippling surface of water, endlessly reflecting the mesmerizing shifts of floating light.
At the blurry intersection between figuration and abstraction, we realize that the reality of an image is nothing more than the subjective construction of visual perception. Unlike the discourse of artistic autonomy from social and political contexts, Long Quan’s works reveal, beneath their formal clarity, subtle traces of the artist’s emotional landscape and his profound engagement with contemporary life. Just as the term floating light captures the transient social reality: The experience of time as ‘the past flows like this,’ the dialectic between eternity and the present moment, change and permanence, the danger of the flatness and imbalance of the water’s surface, the aimless wandering and endless inward spiral, all pointing to an uncertain and unknown future... The artist, in this way, encapsulates our lives—so full of density—onto the material surface of the canvas, silently hanging them on the wall.
Text by Zhang Chen
Installation view of ‘Long Quan: Floating Light’, Tabula Rasa Gallery Beijing, 2025.
About the Artist
LONG Quan (b. 1956, Chongqing, China) holds both a BA and an MA from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China. He has recently held solo exhibitions at Tabula Rasa Gallery in Beijing, James Fuentes Gallery in New York, and YIMA Gallery in Chengdu. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at prestigious institutions, including the National Art Museum of China, the Yuan Art Center, and the Capital Museum in Beijing. He has served as a professor in the Department of Painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and as the Dean of the School of Art and Design at Beihang University in Beijing.
LONG's minimalist, almost naïveté approach to landscape painting emphasises a stark, structural form. With restrained brushstrokes and a controlled palette, he attempts to capture the ephemeral, even elusive state between movement and stillness in nature. In his paintings, mountains, rocks, trees, water, and clouds grow naturally in a slow, deliberate manner, dissolving the immediate urgency that typically defines our relationship with external images. His work offers a calm dignity, achieved through a lucid merging of closeness and remoteness.
Tabula Rasa Gallery (London)
Unit One, 99 East Road,
Hoxton, London
N1 6AQ
Unit One, 99 East Road,
Hoxton, London
N1 6AQ
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