Art Seasons Gallery is pleased to present Zhu Xinyu’s first solo exhibition in Singapore: Drunken House. Zhu Xinyu, a young artist, born 1980, in Haicheng, Liaoning Province, primarily constructs an imagined world that’s long on atmosphere and short on obvious particulars. At least, that would be the initial impression, unifying his paintings of disparate scenes through a deft, summarizing touch; everything is framed almost equally but not mechanically. Issues of perception and recognition structuralized on a fundamental level by the ability of the works to feel at once faint and bold, presence of familiarity yet unreachable, in a state of arrival and departure.

An assault on the senses, his usual imageries are hauntingly lit, gritty, and poetic in their function to both memorialize and delve in an end point in time, making them timeless, which they transform into timelessness. Throughout, the metaphorical complexity of the artist’s painterly approach and the coherent attempt to glean sense out of dispersed visual remains provides the overall key to Zhu’s latest body of work, presented in this solo exhibition. In the past 2 years, he has assembled a handy collection filled with careful staging and deliberate, measured elements whose rigorous formal execution appears as a sort of existential compensation for a world emptied of exalted aspirations or romantic ambition. Tonally executed, the range of aesthetical references spans the natural world, architectural, religiosity, and much more. As with the network of contested sites, the function and strength of Zhu’s paintings depends on the viewer’s making both subtle and explicit connections between individual pieces.