Painting According to Method

On July 9, 2026, GINKGO SPACE will present Painting According to Method, an exhibition featuring the painting practices of Zeng Hong, Xiao Bo, and Dong Dawei. “Method” here refers both to rules and to modes of practice. For the three artists, it signifies the working principles each has established: as a methodology, or as a position of consciousness. In the present moment, marked by an overabundance of images, they no longer regard painting as a medium of representation or narrative. Instead, they turn toward language, material, and the creative process itself. Method becomes an integral component of the work, while the work no longer corresponds to a predetermined result, but rather appears as a provisional manifestation of an ongoing methodological process.

Zeng Hong’s work is grounded in his early lived experience in factories, as well as in a sustained social concern for his times. Through a form of emotional projection, he constructs a planar space marked by structure and order by means of meta-painterly elements such as lines and blocks. Behind the calm and restrained formal language runs a continuous relationship between the body and the act of painting, as well as an ongoing reference between the individual and history.

Xiao Bo regards painting as a creative process that unfolds according to a self-determined method. His Four Panels series is based on a working mechanism in which four panels are painted simultaneously. The synchronization and repetition of the process dissolve the narrativity of painting, allowing the picture plane to become a record of the painting act itself. His establishment of order and rules also points toward a pursuit of constancy and emptiness.

Dong Dawei approaches painting through the materiality of materials themselves. Taking the dot as a basic element, he allows pattern and color to emerge organically in accordance with the inherent properties of the materials. Looking back to the origins of traditional Chinese landscape painting and Western classical fresco, he uses materials such as plaster as the physical foundation of the picture plane. For Dong, the essence of painting lies in its materiality, while artistic creation responds to the material world in which we all coexist.

The exhibition seeks to present a shared artistic proposition: painting is first and foremost concerned with method, rather than image. When painting no longer assumes the function of producing images, the act of “painting” once again becomes a practice of “method.”

Text by Li Qianqian