About the exhibition

Power, conflict,
and the self

Six paintings, 2017–2026

Power enters LIHAO’s paintings through the body: a seated figure holds its ground, another bends, a face hardens into a mask. Bringing together six works made between 2017 and 2026, The Individual Under Pressure examines how authority and conflict shape the ways people face one another—and how those pressures register within the self. Exaggerated features and improbable encounters give these paintings a disconcerting humor. A grin may suggest pleasure, menace, or the effort to conceal fear.

In the small canvases Madness Beneath the Ordinary and The Vigilant Person, the face becomes a site of uncertainty. Eyes, teeth, and flesh resist settling into a reassuring expression. Their intimate scale brings this instability close. Elsewhere, LIHAO stages encounters across open landscapes. The seated and bending figures in Beneath the Tower of Power establish a hierarchy through posture; in Negotiations, flowers and a clenched fist complicate the apparent promise of an exchange. Authority takes shape in who occupies space, who yields, and what a gesture might conceal.

In Lawlessness, a masked adult and a child sit before a burning landscape. Their silence gives the consequences of unchecked power a human form. The figures’ stillness makes the surrounding destruction more difficult to dismiss. Across the exhibition, vulnerability and aggression can inhabit the same body, unsettling any easy division between those who wield power and those who endure it.

The newest painting, The Persistence of Hope, brings this tension into a landscape of war. Bertrand Russell’s face appears in the upper right above a burning landscape, while a distant skyline remains standing. Enormous flowers rise through the ruins; their red and yellow petals echo the flames, making growth and destruction difficult to separate. The flowers offer no evidence that the violence has ended. They make renewal imaginable within a world still being destroyed. Here, hope acquires its difficulty and its force: the capacity to imagine life beyond the conditions that threaten it.