Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, as I tell you about an artist who shatters our certainties about contemporary Chinese painting. Hao Liang (郝量), born in 1983 in Chengdu, is not merely a painter who recycles tradition—he blows it up from within with a refined insolence that would make the masters of the Song dynasty turn in their graves.
This little genius of painted silk, who grew up in a family of filmmakers and immersed himself in art thanks to his collector godfather, a student of Zhang Daqian, offers us a vision of the world where time is no longer the straight arrow the West has tried to force-feed us for centuries. No, in Hao Liang’s universe, time is a Borgesian labyrinth where epochs collide with the grace of a cosmic ballet. Jorge Luis Borges himself would have applauded these works that resemble his most dizzying stories, where present, past, and future intertwine in a macabre dance.
Take his masterpiece “The Virtuous Being” (2015), a horizontal scroll over 9 meters long. This work isn’t just a simple stroll through a Chinese garden—it’s a time-travel machine that obliterates our temporal bearings like a jackhammer crushing a Dalí watch. Wang Shizhen’s Ming dynasty garden gradually morphs into a contemporary amusement park, with a Ferris wheel spinning like a deranged clock, launching its cabins across centuries. It’s Borges meets Walt Disney in a Taoist philosopher’s fever dream.
But Hao Liang isn’t merely a temporal juggler making cheeky nods to art history. His technical mastery of silk painting, inherited from the guohua tradition, is so precise it becomes almost surgical. Every brushstroke is an incision into the fabric of time, every shade of gray a geological stratum of China’s cultural memory. It’s as if Walter Benjamin had reincarnated his theory of history into the hands of a Chengdu painter.
The series “Eight Views of Xiaoxiang” (2016) perfectly illustrates this approach. These eight monumental paintings aren’t just a reinterpretation of a classical Chinese painting theme—they’re a profound meditation on the very nature of contemporary perception. Hao Liang dissects our relationship to the image with the precision of a philosopher neurosurgeon. In “Eight Views of Xiaoxiang – Mind Travel”, he transforms the traditional map into a mental landscape where space folds like an Einsteinian dream. It’s as if Martin Heidegger took up landscape painting after reading Zhuangzi.
Hao Liang’s technique is hallucinatory virtuosity. On silk, as delicate as a cell membrane, he layers infinitesimal amounts of ink and mineral pigments, creating depths that induce vertigo. His grays aren’t simple blends of black and white—they’re expanding universes, chromatic nebulas reminiscent of Hubble telescope photos. Each painting is a miniature cosmos, a string theory of painting where dimensions intertwine like a science fiction novel.
In “Streams and Mountains without End” (2017), a work nearly 10 meters long, Hao Liang achieves the impossible: making Dong Qichang, a Ming dynasty painting theorist, dialogue with Wassily Kandinsky, as if they were always destined to meet. Kandinsky’s abstract forms infiltrate the traditional Chinese landscape not as intruders but as long-lost cousins reunited with their family. It’s a conceptual tour de force that turns art history into a quantum playground where influences circulate in all temporal directions.
The artist doesn’t just juggle historical references—he creates a new visual language that transcends established categories. In his portraits, faces emerge from silk like specters traversing centuries of meditation. His landscapes aren’t depictions of real places but mind maps where each mountain is a crystallized thought, each river a stream of consciousness.
Hao Liang’s treatment of temporality in his work is revolutionary. Where traditional Chinese artists sought to capture eternity in their landscapes, he focuses on the present moment in all its paradoxical complexity. It’s as if Henri Bergson gave painting lessons to a Chan master. Time in his works isn’t a linear succession of events but a constellation of simultaneous experiences echoing across the ages.
His work “Divine Comedy II” (2022) is particularly striking in this regard. Through a grid evoking both a modern prison and the fibers of silk itself, we observe a scene that could take place in Dante’s Inferno or a modern urban park. A character, head down, wrapped in a winter coat, ignores demons perched in the bare trees. It’s an allegory of our contemporary condition, where the extraordinary and the mundane coexist in mutual indifference.
This ability to weave together different pictorial traditions isn’t just an exercise in style—it’s a profound response to the crisis of Chinese modernity. Hao Liang doesn’t aim to reconcile the old and the new but to show that this very division is an illusion. In his works, tradition isn’t a burden to carry or reject but a living tool for understanding the present. It’s as if Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger met in a classical Chinese garden to discuss the aura in the age of digital reproduction.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Hao Liang is his ability to make the invisible visible. In “The Sad Zither” (2023), he transforms the melancholy of poet Li Shangyin into a series of landscapes where sadness itself seems to take shape. The muted colors, evanescent forms, and subtle transitions between abstraction and figuration create a visual poetry that transcends linguistic and cultural barriers. It’s pure synesthesia, where painting becomes music and music becomes emotion.
The recent exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery demonstrates that Hao Liang isn’t just a technical master but a true philosopher of the brush. His works aren’t windows onto the world but mirrors reflecting our own temporal complexity. In an age obsessed with immediacy, he makes us understand that every present moment carries echoes of the past and seeds of the future.
Hao Liang’s art responds to the question of contemporaneity in Chinese painting. It’s not about modernizing tradition or traditionalizing modernity but creating a new pictorial space-time where contradictions coexist without resolution. It’s art that thinks, breathes, and lives to the rhythm of our era while keeping one foot in eternity.