This November, Shanghai’s Huangpu riverbank once again anchors the global contemporary art calendar. Beyond the frames and pedestals, the most captivating encounters during art week are intensely physical—driven by the authentic textures of layered pigments, porous clay, crystallized minerals, and time-polished lusters.

Driven by this “physical vitality,” Deep Time Art Gallery makes its debut at West Bund Art & Design this November, presenting a continuously evolving abstract experimental ground centered on “Material Art.”

Why Materiality?

Viewed through the planetary scale of “deep time,” bypassing millennia of human civilization, all bustling imagery eventually dissipates. Only mud and minerals survive as ancient physical evidence from the Earth’s crust. They are not merely memories of nature, but the most solid physical anchors against today’s digital nihilism.

The six featured artists—Bai Ming, Su Liqun, Zhu Di, Fang Zi, Li Hua, and Dawn Jian—explore how materials actively shape artistic language, bridging traditional paradigms with contemporary concepts.

Bai Ming deconstructs highly time-consuming traditional lacquer—a healing sap that achieves eternity upon drying. Fascinated by its inherent “contradiction and unity,” he channels personal experience into the material’s natural properties through repeated manual polishing. In his exhibited work JING SHU, the profound luster of lacquer replaces complex interpretation, presenting an independent posture that returns an infinitely expansive aesthetic space to the viewer.

With a career spanning over forty years and significant national environmental art projects, Su Liqun distills his massive spatial experience into introspective easel painting. Sketch Basics (III) draw the viewer’s gaze back to the materiality of the canvas using near-monochromatic tones and sparse linear traces. These seemingly weightless marks carry the heavy burden of transforming realistic experience into pure formal exploration.

As the exhibition’s convenor, Fang Zi unites these artists under a shared consensus: to salvage the material and spiritual traces left by immense time. In his East series, he abandons artificial figurative symbols, ceding image generation to his self-developed “YAN powder.” The layered blue-greens and natural sedimentation respond to traditional Chinese landscapes, silently practicing the limitlessness of the Eastern Wuji realm through contemporary geological textures.

Zhu Di integrates Western color and composition with traditional Chinese high-temperature glazes. His work Himalaya transforms the relationship between mountains, snowlines, and clouds into intertwined colors and textures, freezing serendipitous, nebula-like moments at the kiln’s critical melting point.

Li Hua explores material transformation through ceramic sculpture. Abandoning brilliant glazes, she allows pure clay to achieve nirvana within 1240°C flames. The resulting breathing pores resemble carbonized, time-weathered traces, creating a visual tension between softness and hardness, life forms and residual matter.

Navigating between control and chance, Chinese-American artist Dawn Jian uses physical bodily gestures to overwrite AI-generated initial images. In this clash between algorithmic codes and real pigments, she questions the meaning of physical existence.

Different artists, entirely different medium pathways. Like prisms of varying densities, when ancient matter passes through them, they refract a highly tense contemporary spectrum.

Algorithms can endlessly replicate perfect images, but they cannot simulate the natural serendipity of minerals, high temperatures, and gravity. In an era easily compressed into pixels, authentic textures refuse to be flattened.

This November, Deep Time Art Gallery invites you to an “on-site” confrontation at the West Bund Art & Design—bring your body before the artworks to experience the weight, density, and sharpness that no camera lens can translate.

Venue
2A11, West Bund International Convention and Exhibition Center

Artists
Bai Ming, Su Liqun, Zhu Di, Fang Zi, Li Hua, Dawn Jian

Exhibition Dates
10 Nov – 15 Nov 2026

Website
https://deeptimegallery.com/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/deeptime_artgallery/

Contact
business@deeptimegallery.com

About Deep Time Art Gallery

Named after time, Deep Time Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery dedicated to promoting art with the expression of materiality at its core. It explores the extended pathways of art between the micro and the macro, and between the present and the future. Guided by the principles of “Consensus, Co-Practice and Co-Presence,” the gallery builds multidimensional relationships between art and society, nature, and humanity through innovative materials, cross-cultural dialogue, public-space art projects, and other initiatives.

(Text and images courtesy of Deep Time Art Gallery)