Shaping Color

Curator: Ben XIA Tian 

 Artist and Curatorial Collaborator: Lu Yu

Longlati is pleased to present Shaping Color, a group exhibition featuring fourteen artists, opening on April 2nd, 2026. The exhibition title, Shaping Color, points to a recalibration of chromatic relations. In many artistic practices, color does not gain force through endless addition; rather, its structure gradually emerges through restriction, adjustment, and revision. Here, “shaping” names a process of visual judgment: color acquires new relations through contrast and arrangement. Through this exhibition, we ask: How do artists use color? How are chromatic relations established? And how do such relations form a formal structure that can be trusted? The exhibition brings together works by Marina Adams, Josef Albers, Carol Bove, Jeffrey Gibson, Wang Guangle, Li Muhua, Lu Yu, Marina Perez Simão, Joan Snyder, Su Yu-Xin, Sarah Sze, Rosemarie Trockel, Adriana Varejão, and Stanley Whitney.

Shaping Color places color in a position that calls for renewed reflection. Color has always been among the most immediate, and also the most complex, elements of visual experience. It shapes the rhythm of looking, the layering of space, the temperature of the picture, and it participates in the judgments through which perception and imagination take form. Color exists across painting, design, architecture, consumer goods, screen images, and industrial production. It has already become a highly condensed and widely circulating artistic language that speaks directly to the eye. For precisely this reason, color naturally occupies a central place in artistic practice and should be understood as one of the artist’s fundamental disciplines.

At the heart of the exhibition lies the ethical question of color. Ethics here points to a responsibility inherent within form. Color always appears in relation. One color changes through the presence of another, much like one person alters by encountering others, and it gains weight through boundary, scale, material, and light. Color is among the deepest structures of art, determining what is emphasized, subdued, brought forward, or pushed back. It is widely recognized that a “good” chromatic relation possesses a clear internal order while also sustaining an open perceptual field; it allows the picture, amid countless shifts of subject matter, to maintain a convincing balance.