“Muse Garden is pleased to announce the solo exhibition The Love by the legendary female artist Kong Ning, running from August 31 to October 12, 2024. This exhibition marks Kong Ning’s debut in Hong Kong, showcasing seven of her iconic oil paintings alongside video documentation of her performance art. Through these works, Kong Ning transforms her personal experiences and societal appeals into a diverse artistic language that resonates deeply with humanity, probing the essence of life.

Born in Manzhouli, a border city in China, Kong Ning has endured a life marked by hardship—experiencing war, life and death, psychological trauma, and the loss of family members. After weathering these profound trials, she found solace in art, creating works that simulate the senses and inspire contemplation beyond the surface, ultimately illuminating the grand and purest theme of life: love. Her artistic journey intertwines love with the Earth and nature, extending beyond visual aesthetics to become an ethical imperative.

Throughout her two-decade-long career, Kong Ning’s oil paintings and installation-performance art have developed in parallel. Behind the expressive richness and defiance of her work lies a soul of profound sensitivity, vulnerability, and pain, as well as a delicate call for nature, peace, and love. Her bold use of colour captures fleeting emotions and existential insights, with each brushstroke serving as a notation in the ledger of life. For Kong Ning, life itself is an art form. Her extraordinary experiences and innate creative talent drive her to choose art as a vehicle for expressing love, serving as both a reflection on life and a means of continuing it. Through her art, she internalizes her experiences, externalizes her life, and profoundly impacts others with her full strength.

The theme of romantic love is strikingly poignant in Kong Ning’s works. Embraces, kisses, and the metamorphosis of human bodies are powerful motifs. Although these images are drawn from Kong Ning’s own love stories, the figures are imbued with mystery, featuring unique facial expressions and peculiar appearances. These existential portraits transcend cultural boundaries, forming a universal language of love. Remarkably, Kong Ning has never received formal art training; her creations are born from the infinite aura of her intensely lived experiences and emotional sensibilities. Her work flows like an inexhaustible stream of Proustian involuntary memory, overflowing with an endless array of characters, life forms, and the currents of erotic.

Kong Ning’s concept of love and marriage are not confined to human beings, and this state of indistinguishability and mutual integration also spreads to the natural universe.
The image of female figures mingling with plants is central to Kong Ning’s paintings. Having grown up in a remote border area, distant from urbanization, Kong Ning developed an intimate interaction with nature. She yearns to draw from nature’s primordial life force. Her paintings not only represent her autobiographical experiences but also transform each figure into a prototype of the love of nature and an embodiment of the universal human experience. Tender human life interweaves with the resilience of nature, perpetuating itself on this earth through love and kindness.

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