清影

Inna Art Space is pleased to present Solitude and Blooming, a solo project by artist Chen Dongfan at its new location in Lianhe Building.

The artist has transformed a former office unit by removing its furniture and partial partitions, turning each room into a site for spontaneous, in-situ painting. Chen’s work explores the solitude that underlies collective labour within office spaces, searching for narrative threads within the repetitive rhythms of daily routine. His paintings translate the experience of a 9-to-5 life into vivid interventions—disrupting the logic of standardised living, spatial regulation, and routine subjectivity.

The project opens to the public by appointment starting 7 June 2025. On the launch day, Inna Art Space will host a live performance by an independent dance artist Wang Can, whose body will temporarily inhabit and respond to the modified space, creating a fleeting dialogue between movement and painting.

Following this, from mid-June to July, Inna Art Space will collaborate with ISHINOMAKI LABORATORY to launch an extended programme titled  Lianhe Building Simulated Office Co.Ltd.A-301, curated by Zhang Jiawei. returning the function of this formerly corporate space back to “office work.” We will furnish the rooms with desks and chairs, and open reservations to anyone looking for a change of working environment—small teams without meeting rooms, freelancers who can’t concentrate at home, or job seekers who want to simulate being at work. This office-turned-exhibition site will become a temporary workspace surrounded by images and shifting scenery.

Inna Art Space is pleased to present Solitude and Blooming, a solo project by artist Chen Dongfan at its new location in Lianhe Building.

The artist has transformed a former office unit by removing its furniture and partial partitions, turning each room into a site for spontaneous, in-situ painting. Chen’s work explores the solitude that underlies collective labour within office spaces, searching for narrative threads within the repetitive rhythms of daily routine. His paintings translate the experience of a 9-to-5 life into vivid interventions—disrupting the logic of standardised living, spatial regulation, and routine subjectivity.

The project opens to the public by appointment starting 7 June 2025. On the launch day, Inna Art Space will host a live performance by an independent dance artist Wang Can, whose body will temporarily inhabit and respond to the modified space, creating a fleeting dialogue between movement and painting.

Following this, from mid-June to July, Inna Art Space will collaborate with ISHINOMAKI LABORATORY to launch an extended programme titled  Lianhe Building Simulated Office Co.Ltd.A-301, curated by Zhang Jiawei. returning the function of this formerly corporate space back to “office work.” We will furnish the rooms with desks and chairs, and open reservations to anyone looking for a change of working environment—small teams without meeting rooms, freelancers who can’t concentrate at home, or job seekers who want to simulate being at work. This office-turned-exhibition site will become a temporary workspace surrounded by images and shifting scenery.

In the public areas and online community, we hope to foster informal exchanges and shared moments among participants, allowing traces of their presence to gradually accumulate. On weekends, the space will also be open to proposals for workshops, performances, talks, and other forms of gathering. Over the course of six weeks, this repurposed site will serve as an open interface—continually activated by new rhythms, relationships, and the imprint of those who pass through.

Artist’s Statement:

My practice has long been a search for poetry in the architecture of the city. Looking back at Hangzhou’s metamorphosis—from a city of rivers and tourists to a capital of the internet age—the skyline, now bristling with high-rises, stands as a quiet chronicle of time. Within these office towers, order, efficiency, and estrangement weave together into a peculiar collective space—an ideal vantage point from which to observe the contemporary condition of human existence.

Though I do not work in an office, my life moves to a similar rhythm. The dawn crowds in the subway, the studio light burning into the deep hours of night—these shared beats of urban life have shaped my sense of time and solitude. Within the routine, and from within the quiet of solitude, my work finds its pulse.

An office is a space of collectivity, yet it breeds solitude in abundance. In this site-specific painting project, I sought to transform that quiet, universal loneliness into visual form. Through vivid clashes of color and existential reflection, my paintings intervene in this non-art space, striving to create a kind of “temporary community”—where meaning is not imposed but co-authored by every viewer who encounters the work.

Solitude and Blooming is itself a manifesto. It gestures toward a narrative arc—from repression to release, from silence to wild emergence. It speaks of the friction between intimacy and expansion, between containment and vitality. This very tension is the essence of public art’s enchantment when it enters the spaces of the everyday—at once a poetic pause in the rhythm of life and a soft resistance to environments built for sameness.

Artist’s Statement:

My practice has long been a search for poetry in the architecture of the city. Looking back at Hangzhou’s metamorphosis—from a city of rivers and tourists to a capital of the internet age—the skyline, now bristling with high-rises, stands as a quiet chronicle of time. Within these office towers, order, efficiency, and estrangement weave together into a peculiar collective space—an ideal vantage point from which to observe the contemporary condition of human existence.

Though I do not work in an office, my life moves to a similar rhythm. The dawn crowds in the subway, the studio light burning into the deep hours of night—these shared beats of urban life have shaped my sense of time and solitude. Within the routine, and from within the quiet of solitude, my work finds its pulse.

An office is a space of collectivity, yet it breeds solitude in abundance. In this site-specific painting project, I sought to transform that quiet, universal loneliness into visual form. Through vivid clashes of color and existential reflection, my paintings intervene in this non-art space, striving to create a kind of “temporary community”—where meaning is not imposed but co-authored by every viewer who encounters the work.

Solitude and Blooming is itself a manifesto. It gestures toward a narrative arc—from repression to release, from silence to wild emergence. It speaks of the friction between intimacy and expansion, between containment and vitality. This very tension is the essence of public art’s enchantment when it enters the spaces of the everyday—at once a poetic pause in the rhythm of life and a soft resistance to environments built for sameness.

When solitude becomes the shadow of the office tower—and of the modern city at large—art offers a possibility: that the unheard might bloom. That those quiet selves, long submerged, might finally come into flower.

Chen Dongfan

Hangzhou, 2025