Bingqing Dong: The Burning Abyss Within

Longlati presents a recent works exhibition by artist Bingqing Dong on April 2nd, 2026. The exhibition features paintings created over the past four months, alongside a video work. Since the opening of her on-site project Extra Episode at Longlati on November 11th, 2025, the artist has continued the on-going practice within the exhibition space, transforming the act of creation itself into a durational accumulation and an existential practice. Titled The Burning Abyss Within, the exhibition points to the artist’s sustained inquiry into her past lived experience, the soul, and fate, while also reflecting her recent trajectory of reconstructing an internal order through artistic practice in response to the external world.

"The external world enters the body. Fate, through others, enters me."

Within her works, animalized bodies, plush-like brushstrokes, and recurring portraits form a visual language situated between defense and exposure. These figures function both as masks of persona and as externalizations of psychological adaptive mechanisms, revealing processes of self-protection and reconfiguration under conditions of pressure and uncertainty. Over the course of four months of continuous practice, she has transformed Longlati’s exhibition space as a semi-open studio, a process akin to exposure therapy: bringing an otherwise private creative state into the public realm, while gradually desensitizing the artist herself to the condition of being observed. It also constitutes a behavioral experiment that foregrounds the self.

The artist describes the figure “Paula” in her work as representing the existence of an “abhorrent weakling.” Through the repeated depiction of the “weak,” the Paula series continuously generates cross-media expressions while implicating the subjectivity of the viewer. At the same time, her ongoing sculptural and visual-musical theatre projects approach facets of human nature—such as innocence, strength, desire, and obsession—as critical nodes within a systemic problematic. This exhibition primarily presents her recent large-scale paintings, offering a highly condensed articulation of her existing narrative logic, alongside a more immediate and intensified primal expression.

Her practice constitutes an ongoing contemplation of human nature, life and death, and existence, as well as a visual experimentation with psychological mechanisms and states of being. Having undergone extreme physical and psychological experiences, she engages in repeated painting as a process of cognitive restructuring and psychological recalibration—akin to continuously feeding data into an algorithmic system to optimize the self. Creation thus becomes a dynamic mechanism: both a process of self-regulation and boundary reconstruction, and a means for the individual, within structurally conditioned fate, to rebuild psychological defenses and respond to the external world. Even when powerless before fate, one must nonetheless exert everything in resistance.