The exhibition features 19 representative works created between 2014 and 2025, in which the artist employs handmade paper, tempera, printing ink, and fabric through a process of repeated layering and erasure. The resulting surfaces embody both the incisive force of carved marks and the fluid, breathing vitality of color.

Exhibition Article

The most distinctive feature of Bao Pei's painting is a constant state of layering: pigments are repeatedly superimposed, images overlap with each other, brushstrokes, colors, and splashes interweave. The space on the paper continuously intertwines and folds, as if she were always trying to compress infinite capacity into a single work.

The backgrounds of these works on paper are grids printed in ink—square lattices—upon which diagonal lines are superimposed. These diagonals do not submit to the grid’s vertical and horizontal logic; they seem to resist belonging to the grid, to be a kind of misprint. This very interlacing is the difference of superimposition: repetition ultimately produces error, just as the replication of DNA brings mutation, allowing life to evolve. If the essence of modernism is the grid, then Bao Pei takes modernism—both as an art-historical concept and as a visual experience—as the very background of her practice. In her works, the vertical and horizontal lines establish a coordinate system, while the interlaced diagonals introduce looseness. In continuing modernism, she quietly generates difference.

From a personal perspective, these intersecting grids derive, first, from the artist’s own printmaking practice, especially the backgrounds of woodcuts, in which lies a deeply rooted cultural memory. The book Shuowen (which wrote at Han dynasty) defines “wen” (文) as “crossed strokes,” an image of intersecting lines; our earliest writing experience began with these incised, intersecting marks. Secondly, they come from the shadows cast by woven cane chairs, whose crisscrossing horizontal, vertical, and diagonal weave stimulates a dialogue between space, plane, and line. These shadows not only inspire a fascination with the materiality of existence, but also reaffirm a conception of projection and representation that traces back to Plato’s allegory of the cave—the very core of Western theories of mimesis.

Every work is finite, particularly for contemporary painters, who create at a time when the boundaries of artistic concepts and language have already expanded into the boundless. The artist must anchor a certain sense of limitation as the fulcrum of her strength. For Bao Pei, the interwoven grids—serving as both the conceptual background and the physical substratum of the image—appear to constitute constraint and repetition, yet they are more like the trellis in a garden, giving the vine of sensibility more room for unexpected growth. As we can see: oil color, printing ink, tempera pigments…even light itself, together with smearing, dripping, flowing, scraping, pressing…these seemingly inexhaustible materials and techniques all appear in Bao Pei’s work, pointing toward the image of a luxuriant, teeming garden—indeed, toward an image of life itsel