Feng Lianghong: Emptiness is Transformation

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Matthew Liu Fine Arts is honored to present Feng Lianghong’s latest solo exhibition, Emptiness is Transformation. Structured through a chromatic framework and anchored in the concept of emptiness (kong), the exhibition traces the artist’s sustained spiritual inquiry rooted in Eastern thought and embodied through abstraction.

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Feng does not position himself against Western abstraction; he moves through it, quietly dissolving its essential divisions. Where Western abstraction often reaches inner sensation through form, Eastern thought writes form directly from the mind, seeking an intuitive apprehension of the cosmos. The emotional resonance of Rothko’s color fields, the structural philosophy of Brice Marden, and the material energy of Pierre Soulages all converge on a shared question of human contemplation. Within this lineage, Feng chooses restraint: “The more limited the means, the more profound the expression.” Emptiness becomes his vessel, loosening attachment to form.

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For Feng, painting need not project objective meaning; it offers instead a quiet attentiveness to the shared, half- lost memory of human experience. Through pouring, dripping, and scraping, he invites the accidental and the unconscious to surface organically. Color and mark move like tides—restrained yet rhythmically alive. Negative space is not absence but the breathing of vital force (qi), a generative void from which poetic resonance arises.

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The exhibition gathers recent works as a meditation on color, spirit, and emptiness. The large-scale ochre series Knowing Autumn 22–31 lays warm tones over pale blue underpainting, tempering chromatic expansion while deep blue strokes introduce an inner pulse—continuing Western abstraction’s inquiry into color while resonating with Eastern spatial wisdom. Gray 25–17, built through densely layered palette-knife marks, recalls the textural vocabulary of classical Chinese landscape painting, evoking the vast vitality of Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Mountains and Streams. More recent works—White 25–7, Blue Impression 24–5, and Untitled 25–10—press further into the problem of white, suspending painting at a liminal threshold between chromatic essence and spir- itual core. Virginia Woolf, in The Mark on the Wall, began with a small, indistinct spot and allowed conscious- ness to drift without destination. This unbound movement—resonant with John Cage’s belief that “art is life, and the accidental is essential,” and with Duchamp’s readymade—finds a parallel in Feng’s practice. The works here remain open, contingent, and generative, aligned with the Zen principle of non-abiding: “Produce thought with- out dwelling anywhere.”

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The exhibition may also be read as a process of reduction. Untitled 21–1 (2021), the most formally charged work in the exhibition, pulses with chromatic tension and urgent gesture. In subsequent years, Feng has progressively simplified his planes, thinned his layers, and expanded his voids, allowing the meaning of emptiness to emerge with increasing clarity. The center of gravity shifts from formal tension toward chromatic essence and spiritual presence. “Emptiness is not a negation of existence, but its most extreme affirmation.” In relinquishing attach- ment to language and embracing contingency, Feng transforms painting from gesture into cosmology. Within the bounded space of the canvas—holding no single law, abandoning no single law—one encounters freedom, the cosmos, and the eternal.

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Feng Lianghong’s work has been exhibited internationally at major museums and institutions, including Today Art Museum (Beijing), National Art Museum of China (Beijing), Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), Yuan Art Museum (Beijing), National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), UCCA (Beijing), Museum Angerlehner (Linz), Galerie der Stadt Leonding (Leonding), the Swatch Art Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, and Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts (Raleigh). His works are held in the per- manent collections of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney), In- side-Out Art Museum (Beijing), Duke Arts Center (Raleigh), Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston), and Swatch Art Center (Geneva), as well as in private collections worldwide.