“Sutures of a Fractured World”

There are works that do not depict collapse — they embody its inner form. In Hang LU’s art, it is not History that is recounted, but its slow combustion. The pictorial matter becomes a resonance chamber for a world in disintegration, where survival gestures persist as hollow imprints.

This exhibition opens like a wound: gaping, silent, irreversible. The figures it summons are neither allegorical nor documentary. They emerge from a void, in a moment of total meaninglessness, as though humanity, caught in its final spasm, were dancing its own extinction. Inspired by the “dancing plague” that struck Strasbourg in 1518, Hang LU does not cite — he transposes. He transforms this hallucinatory event into a pictorial gesture, where trance becomes a formal language.

These convulsive bodies evoke the searing intensity of Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528) in the Isenheim Altarpiece, where pain becomes structure. Here, contagion is not medical but psychic — a shared vertigo, a choreographed impulse of collapse, infecting even the very substance of the painting.

These figures are joined by echoes of Jean Fautrier’s (1898–1964) bestial murmurs, faces lacerated like the tormented souls of Francis Bacon (1909–1992), and hybrid forms oscillating between the human and the monstrous, recalling the medieval chimerae or Max Ernst (1891–1976). These presences haunt the canvas like intersigns of catastrophe — not spectacular, but latent.

One recurring motif emerges: the suture. Visible or concealed, it connects the fragments without healing them. It is a stitching that comes after the rupture — a tentative coherence in a splintered world. It resonates with Georges Didi-Huberman’s concept of the “wounded image” (La ressemblance par contact, 2008), where the image becomes a traumatic trace rather than a representation.

The macabre dance of the figures responds to a deeper silence — that of the material itself. A pictorial muteness that echoes Susan Sontag’s reflections on the mute suffering of the image in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). LU does not depict — he infects. The image is contaminated, saturated with silence and red — a red that does not adorn, but seeps, festers, consumes.

In this infected figuration, one also hears distant echoes of Fernand Léger (1881–1955) — not in joyful geometry, but in the mechanization of volumes, now become existential automatons. These figures, dehumanized yet still animated by a residual breath, evoke the tensions between flesh and machine in the interwar period — an era already haunted by its coming collapse.

Lurking in the distance are the Four Horsemen — not depicted, but insinuated into the very fabric of the painting. War, plague, famine, death: not only historical phenomena, but psychic states. Through their subtle evocation, LU aligns himself with the legacy of Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), and his Caprichos, in which reason surrenders to the monsters of the dream.

LU’s dogs wander like angels without a sky. His humans dance like “bodies without organs” — in the Deleuzian and Guattarian sense (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980), referring to bodies stripped of biological function, reduced to vectors of flow, pain, or desire.

This exhibition is less a plastic proposition than a field of silent tensions, where the memory of saints without churches, the beauty of figures without salvation, and the persistence of a voiceless breath intersect. It is a traversal of matter as one would cross a crisis — animated by the mute conviction that painting, despite everything, can still manifest a symptom.