Ouyang Chun
Nirvana
White Space, Beijing

Recusant self-taught painter Ouyang Chun has never cared to be fashionable, and his new show “Nirvana” dares you to hold that against him. You can’t, despite instinct and effort. Across three floors of 798’s D01 Building—stripped and gutted by collector and interior designer Tian Jun into a derelict labyrinth of exposed concrete—the exhibition assembles seven years of works, monumental and unabashed, entirely disinterested in approval. Risks accumulate along his brutish geological surfaces, alternately abrasive and exultant, carrying the urgent, unruly, slightly reckless energy of someone for whom painting is less a career than a compulsion.

What strikes first is the sheer effusion—color, texture, incident, inflection—unleashed across immense canvases. Their physical reach and chromatic force produce an ecclesiastical sensation, the secular equivalent of light through stained glass. Up close, the handling is nimble yet childlike—tender, even—in a way the scale doesn’t prepare you for. In the vertical diptych Anthill (2021), tunnels snake through patchworked landscapes, higgledy-piggledy buildings, abstract caves, and gnarled roots, with vignettes embedded throughout: disembodied palms splayed on a bridge; stick figures climbing a staircase. The upright register invokes the grammar of classical scroll painting, but its compositional density floods the expanse that tradition reserves for silence. The work suggests interconnectivity but above all a vast, unsparing adjacency of existence, Boschian in logic: shift your gaze and the mood changes, every corner harboring another world.