Hongrui Henry Liu: In Drift

Hive Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Hongrui Henry Liu’s first solo exhibition in China, In Drift, opening on March 13, 2026, at Hive - Becoming, Shanghai. As the 61st instalment of the “Hive - Becoming” (HBP) program, this exhibition brings together more than ten of the artist’s latest paintings. Hongrui Henry Liu lives and works in London. Drawing from fragmented urban experiences, his work interweaves architectural, landscape, and bodily elements into a psychological space through the visual language of layering, accumulation, and repetition. With a relaxed yet refined painterly language, he reconstructs the relationships between individual, space, and memory within the context of cross-cultural mobility and existential perspectives. Curated by Xia Xiaoyan, the exhibition will run through April 14, 2026.

The term 'In Drift' draws upon the figure of the flâneur discussed by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, yet it exceeds a mere mode of physical movement and instead describes a structure of being-in-the-world. The drifter wanders among urban crowds and streets, not aiming at arrival but lingering in observation and experiencing through suspension; both immersed in the city and maintaining distance from it, the drifter is at once spectator and reader of the spectacle of modernity. The rise of the modern metropolis places the individual within continuous stimuli composed of speed, commodities, and images. Experience thus becomes fragmented, appearing as episodes, encounters, and fleeting perceptions. In the contemporary context, the drifter acquires new meaning: amid global mobility, identity migration, and cultural interweaving, individuals remain in prolonged states of transition. Belonging no longer points to a fixed location but becomes an ongoing process of generation. People move among different cultures and memories, continually assembling their experiences across ruptures.