Whitestone Gallery Beijing is pleased to announce the upcoming group exhibition The Air, Softening, on view from March 14 to April 18, 2026, with an opening reception on Saturday, March 14, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM. Spring rarely arrives with clear boundaries. Before blossoms emerge and temperatures rise, the air is often the first to change: tension gradually recedes, and the world quietly shifts into a different rhythm. The turning point has yet to appear, yet transformation is already underway. The Air, Softening refers to such a moment of transition—when everything is on the verge of unfolding, still suspended within a liminal state. Forms have not fully taken shape; vitality gathers silently, sustaining a restrained yet persistent tension.

This exhibition brings together five artists from diverse cultural contexts—Bao Pei, Debbie Reda, Rebecca Bernau, Wu Shuang, and Clément Denis. Layering and repetition, childlike expressions, ambiguous figures, charged colors, and preserved traces intersect across the works. Here, the artworks unfold in quiet dialogue, allowing change to take place gradually. Spring is neither identified nor depicted directly; it exists softly within these subtle shifts, emerging slowly in places that resist immediate notice.

Artists

Bao Pei, "Hey, spring" 2026, Handmade paper, tempera, printing ink, oil color and fabric, 128.0 × 115.0 cm

Bao Pei (b.1960)
grounds her practice in the accumulation of lived experience and material engagement. The logic of woodcut carving, the chromatic sensibility of oil painting, and the layered application of tempera interweave within her work, forming a composed and steady tension through continuous construction and adjustment. Color surfaces slowly, layers accrue, and time settles into the image—suggesting a state still in the process of gathering, like early spring air that retains both moisture and weight.

Debbi Reda, "Let's go to the beach" 2022, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 114.0 × 130.0 × 4.0 cm

Debbie Reda (b.1976)
draws her pictorial language from Art Brut and childlike modes of intuitive expression. Repetition and simplified forms shape a visual system that is both playful and perceptive. Using “monsters” as a recurring motif, she integrates humor, play, and everyday emotions into her compositions, maintaining an openness that resists closure. These figures, rooted in childhood experience, introduce a bright and liberated rhythm into the space, allowing the atmosphere to feel lighter almost without notice.

Rebecca Bernau, "Rodeo with Romeo" 2023, Acrylic on framed dibond, 70.0 × 70.0 cm

Rebecca Bernau (b.1982)
presents a restrained yet ambiguous state within her work. Figures are retained through abstraction and reduction, while their gestures remain unstable and their boundaries increasingly blurred. Her paintings linger in moments that have yet to be fully named—maintaining distance while simultaneously inviting intimacy. Like air during seasonal transition, change has already occurred, yet it remains difficult to define with clarity.

Wu Shuang, "Back to Freedom" 2025, Oil on canvas, 80.0 × 50.0 cm

Wu Shuang (b.1986)
centers her practice on color as a driving force. Colors extend and intersect across the surface, generating a continuously flowing rhythm. Shaped by years of living and working in different locations, natural landscapes are translated into expressions of emotion and energy. Her compositions remain in a state of outward expansion; warmth gradually rises through color, and emotion begins to circulate before order is established, forming a dynamic sense of life in motion.

Clément Denis, "Oiseau laissé pour trace (n°139 22)" 2021, Acrylic on paper, 15.0 × 20.0 cm

Clément Denis (b.1991)
focuses on the fleeting and the residual. In his practice, painting becomes the record of a brief action—once the movement disappears, a trace remains. The birds he repeatedly depicts do not point to specific representations, but function instead as subtle indicators of presence, appearing quietly within the image. Like the earliest changes in the air, they draw little attention, yet continuously alter the overall perception.

Together, the works of these five artists resonate within a shared space, forming a field that gradually warms. Bao Pei’s layering, Debbie Reda’s sense of play, Rebecca Bernau’s ambiguous figures, Wu Shuang’s chromatic flow, and Clément Denis’s moments of pause converge like air currents from different directions. Rather than directing attention toward fixed forms, they collectively cultivate a state of looseness and openness. The air between the works softens almost imperceptibly, and time itself seems to slow.

Spring is not a moment that has already arrived, but a process still unfolding. It exists where emotions have yet to be named, where perception begins to loosen, and where small yet tangible changes take hold. A new order is quietly coming into being.