May You Be Full of Desire and Fear
M+M Gallery is pleased to present May You Be Full of Desire and Fear, the first solo exhibition by 27-year-old artist Lihong BAI, who received her MA from the Royal College of Art two years ago. Bringing together works in a range of forms and media, the exhibition traces the artist’s artistic formation while following her ongoing interrogations of the world around her.
Why do we assume that the human must remain at the center? What happens when we move beyond a human-centered view and question our impulse to dominate the world around us? If we place a person within a mountain, a sea, or a city, are they still the center—or simply one presence among many? And if the human is no longer the dominant point of reference, how might we understand our own existence?
This is the question Lihong Bai carries with her from landscape painting. She began studying Chinese painting at six, but its influence on her goes beyond technique and imagery. What draws her to shanshui is its enduring question: how does the human exist within the world? In traditional landscapes, figures appear as tiny traces within vast mountains, rivers, clouds, and trees—a small presence within the larger flow of the natural world.
How might we move beyond a human-centered perspective to contemplate heaven and earth? For Lihong Bai, this is not some distant antiquity, but a way of rethinking the world today. It is from this perspective that we can approach her doubts and interrogations: if she herself is already part of this world, how might the body move, sense, adapt, resist, migrate through it, and leave traces behind? Her practice also engages with contemporary thought’s renewed interrogation of the relationship between the subject and space.
This exhibition presents Bai‘s monumental 355 × 165 cm work Heterotopia (2025). Although she gives it the unassuming Chinese title “Shanshui,” or landscape, its character is not quite what the name suggests. Ink lines of varying thickness stretch horizontally across the canvas. Black and dark-brown arcs pass through pale, translucent geometric forms, while shapes resembling rocks or fragments of landscape emerge and recede. The work possesses both the fluidity characteristic of ink painting and the structural quality of geometric abstraction. The imagery of classical landscape remains, yet the artist dismantles it into lines, planes, colors, and spatial relationships. Its English title, Heterotopia, directly opens up another line of inquiry, recalling Michel Foucault’s discussion of “heterotopias”: spaces that exist within reality while remaining dislocated from its established order. Is landscape an object to be viewed, or is it a place in which we are already situated?
If Heterotopia retains traces of classical landscape, Death & Hope (2025) moves toward a more forceful spatial language, closer to contemporary abstraction. A huge black arc-like brushstroke descends and curves through the center of the canvas, its weight set against brown, gray-white, and translucent geometric forms. Fine lines cut across the composition from different directions, while a tiny human figure is almost swallowed by the monumental structure. The contrast between the heavy black form and the lighter, more open space creates a strong sense of tension. The artist compares the work’s sense of transformation to a withered sunflower, which she sees not as decay or an ending, but as a new state of being. Existence shifts from one form to another through continual collision and change, ultimately finding a way to settle into itself.
In After My Death, I Hope to Become the Wildflowers on My Grave (2026), a green ground is punctuated by clusters of red, purple, and orange brushstrokes that gather into wild, exuberant flowers. Dark lines weave through them, functioning both as stems and as structural frameworks. Bai’s “flowers” offer no whispered language of flowers; instead, they embody a life form charged with speed and movement. Hence the artist’s phrase, “wildly shaking my head.” In her imagination, if flowering finds its endpoint in death, then it should arrive there with noise and exuberance.
This energy erupting from within forms becomes even more explicit in Blooming (2026). Expanses of yellow, red, and green form an almost saturated field of color, their vivid hues colliding with one another. At the center, however, stands a form enclosed within a black circle, like a suddenly inserted point of stability. What truly draws the viewer is the simultaneous presence of stability and eruption: color grows and disperses outward, while the center remains contained within a closed circle.
At first glance, Paradise Lost (2025) appears bright and open. Pale blue, off-white, and yellow create a spacious, loosely structured environment, with geometric forms overlapping one another and several nearly blank circles floating within it, accompanied by small traces resembling flowers and figures. Compared with the other works, the painting feels quieter and more restrained, offering a moment of stillness within the exhibition.
May the swing swing gently and not hurt you (2025) allows brushwork to become the direct protagonist of the image. Measuring only 36 × 40 cm, the work nevertheless brings together forceful, rough strokes with delicate lines, color fields, and gradients within its limited dimensions. Through shifts in scale and density, the artist creates a pronounced spatial depth, establishing distinct foreground and background and giving the small painting an unexpectedly full sense of three-dimensionality.
Through MayYou Full of Desire and Fear, Lihong Bai articulates what it means to be alive in a raw yet sensitive manner—one that audiences will readily resonate with.
