LOYAL is proud to present Tianyue Zhong’s first solo exhibition in Europe, Melting Mute. In this new group of eight oil paintings installed in the ground floor gallery, Tianyue Zhong unveils a painted abstract universe where fields of color interlaced with whirls of flowing channels guide us through Zhong’s representation of motion, nature, and memory. Outlines of figures sometimes appear in her paintings, existing in a realm between their original form and abstract billowing clouds of paint, obscuring and offering interpretations of characters, historical events, and her own experiences.

Throughout her artistic process, Zhong avoids fixating on a single image. Instead, she paints with fluidity, moving back and forth on the canvas, allowing intuition to guide her brushstrokes. Time, and its spherical nature, is the seed of Zhong’s practice. This concept suggests time is constantly repeating and overlapping on itself, rather than moving in a straight line from past to present. Spherical thinking opens experiences of ‘everpresentness’, a state in which all events are felt to be taking place simultaneously.

In this exhibition, everpresentness is experienced in fleeting moments released in each painting as Zhong explores the connections between past events and present experiences with imagery and subject matter derived from her research into historical photographs from 20th-century modern China, as well as Zhong’s own photographs and moments encountered in Shangri-la during January 2024.

While Peel and Pull suggest movement, an unveiling or tug, and were painted wet on wet in a short time period, the majority of Zhong’s paintings in the exhibition were created over the course of months, depicting mutual relationships such as germination and withering, enhancement and diminishment, arrival and departure. In Exit, a figure in roller skates floats in an ephemeral haze of shadow, light, and bone-colored scars, a reference to one of Yann Layma’s photographs from “Yesterday’s China”, a series of work spanning from 1985 to 2000. A haunting female figure looks out at the viewer in Per Second, wisps of soft blue frame and obscure the figure’s face simultaneously. Her seated pose clutching a cup amidst a misted abstraction denotes layers of time and distance anchored in the now.

In both Pull and Break Free Zhong focuses on a poignant moment in which the fluid movement of air at The Ganden Sumtsenling Monastery in Yunnan province, China shifted the form of sheer curtains as they gently billowed in and out. The Buddhist monastery, initially constructed in the 17th century and later reconstructed after having been severely damaged during the Cultural Revolution, is a place where Zhong perceived time flowing at a unique rhythm. Zhong likens this feeling of time to the transformation of ice melting into water and water freezing back into ice or akin to emotionally charged words getting stuck in the throat. Melting Mute unfolds this core or essence, thin moments where the membrane between structures of time and place collapse, leaving a trail of lucidity.

TIANYUE ZHONG (b. 1994, Chengdu, China) lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London (2020) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018). Solo and duo shows include To Cut A Thread and A Momentary Playground at Long Story Short (New York and Los Angeles) and Pause, Arise at Mou Projects (Hong Kong). Group exhibitions include Loyal at El Royale II (Los Angeles), F2T Gallery (Milan), Tabula Rasa (Beijing), Mou Projects (Shanghai), LBF Contemporary (London), Visentin Fine Art LTD (London), Stems Gallery (Brussels), Long Story Short (Paris), Fold Gallery (London) and Yuan Museum (Beijing).