Portals to the Past at Lychee One, London pairs meticulously-organised laboratory equipment and nebulous oil paintings
An unidentifiable animal skull nestles in peat-moss on the top of a pedestal. From its cavernous eye sockets, incense smoke slowly spirals up. Oblivious of the gallery visitors who watch them with unease, fungus gnats hatched from the moss are busy crawling around the forbidding sculpture installation. Like a boundary marker, Qian Qian’s Form and Emptiness (all works 2024) guards the border of her solo exhibition Portal to the Past. To walk past it is to be teleported into a realm where the unsettling signs of death and decay join a constant flux of metaphysical life energy.
Qian envisions a realm marked by the mutual infiltration of science and mythology, exploring what she calls in her artist statement ‘ecomythticism’. In an almost ominous way, delicate laboratory equipment floats alongside peculiar creatures in the artist’s paintings. Propped up by a frail skeleton of roots, a malicious-looking flower appears to be operating a system of round-bottomed flasks and test tubes held by a brass clamp stand (In a Greenhouse Somewhere). Although contained, agitated waves and thunderbolts inside the glass vessels signal a catastrophe-to-come. In The Oracle we peep through the cracks of a trompe l’oeil layer of plaster and discover a similarly complicated apparatus. In the foreground, a headless phoenix unfolds its majestic wings and swings its tails. Surrounded by an esoteric collection of things – including spiky vertebrae, a dripping rainbow and an atomic model – the mythical creature seems to carry a lost prophecy about the destiny of the universe.
The meticulously rendered surface effects and anatomies of Qian’s curious creatures bring to mind artistic traditions characterised by an obsession with naturalism and scientific accuracy. The avian skeletons, glassy butterflies and giant insect legs with stingers she depicts are reminiscent of the fauna and floral in Dutch Golden Age still-life paintings and eighteenth-century botanical illustrations. However, Qian’s paintings are ambivalent about where such painstaking attempts of capturing ‘ecomythticism’ will take us. Incarnated in nebulous washes of colours, unknown cosmic energy swashes against the delicate curios. What awaits human beings in this eternal undulation of lights and forms is chillingly unclear: we only see faceless humanoid creatures with translucent bodies develop unsettling features and become engulfed by raging torrents of colour.
The use of watercolours in several works, with wavering shadows where colours flow, puddle and bloom freely, gives way to the congealed paints and hardened outlines of Qian’s oil paintings. In Tidal Recall and the three Portraits, although the biomorphic forms and abstract patterns remain mysterious, they are weighed down by the viscous impermeability created by impasto. The artist’s oil paintings and sculpture transform the faint traces left by otherworldly beings and abstract substances into concrete objects. As mystic beasts’ remains turn into carefully studied specimens (as in the bone and horn of Altar II), or the physical collectibles of Form and Emptiness, Qian’s elusive evocation of death and immateriality seems to have become too literal. Nonetheless, rising from the sculpture and rippling into the gallery space, incense smoke reminds us of the unceasing transmutations between the material world and those realms beyond it. Silently, away from the fixity of these canvases, perpetual change shrouds us all.
Portals to the Past at Lychee One, London, 2 May – 1 June
