Leo Gallery is pleased to present Adriatic, a new solo exhibition by the artist Chen Kai. The exhibition features works from the Adriatic series created between 2023 and 2025, bringing together several large-scale paintings alongside a group of small oil paintings titled Interval. Through disciplined and pointillist gestures, Chen Kai weaves a memory of coastal light and air into a series of visual fabrics that grow quietly and seem to breathe. These works mark a significant development in his exploration of color, the continuity of painting, and the emotional dimensions of abstraction.
“A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.”
—— Mark Rothko
Rothko’s declaration offers a key insight into understanding Chen Kai’s artistic practice. His work begins with an intense moment of looking along the coast of Trieste, Italy: the way light settles at sunset, the subtle trembling of air on the water’s surface, and how the texture of time becomes slow and tactile when the body sinks into the sea. These fleeting perceptions did not lead to a depiction of landscape; instead, they crystallized into an inner energy that drives the painting process. The endless accumulation of points of color on the canvas is not intended to recreate the sea’s form, but to hold onto a "memory touched by light," capturing a perceptual state that flares within yet resists articulation. This resonates with Rothko’s understanding of color as an emotional field, and with his belief that painting constructs a self-contained site of feeling and experience.
This transformation of inner experience into a visual field takes shape through a labor akin to a practice of devotion. In works such as Adriatic (Clear Day) and Adriatic (Sunrise), Chen Kai employs tens of thousands of dot-like strokes using oil paint and oil stick. Each mark is a small decision. Emerging gradually from a translucent ground, the points respond to one another and accumulate layer by layer, eventually forming an organic lattice that seems to possess its own breathing rhythm. Viewed from afar, the paintings appear as unified atmospheres of color and light; up close, they disperse into gatherings of minute traces—some dense like murmurs, others sparse like breaths—collectively weaving the texture of time. For Chen Kai, pointillism is both meditation and perseverance. It rejects the theatricality of gestural flourish and instead trusts the slow strength of cumulative time. This supple yet insistent mode of making stands in contrast to the "heroic gesture" of Abstract Expressionism and subtly echoes the artist’s lived experience as queer.
In dialogue with the monumental works shaped by such sustained intention is a group of small oil paintings titled Interval. Emerging from the everyday rhythms of the studio—residual pigments on the palette, the unconscious flow of paint washed from brushes—they are not planned compositions but moments of breathing within the larger body of works improvisational poems that slip into the otherwise rigorous logic of the series.
Adriatic is not only a response to a particular sea, but also a painterly conviction that moves counter to the accelerated tempo of the present. These works ask the viewer to recalibrate the act of looking: to pause, to approach, and to allow the eye to wander among the countless points of color. Only through this slow attention does the faint radiance—born of memory and sustained labor—begin to reveal itself. It is a steady and gentle light, the most subtle yet enduring trace left by painting as it continually unfolds over time.
About the Artist
Chen Kai (b. 1972, Wuhan, China) received his BFA in Oil Painting from Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 2012, and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2018. He currently lives and works in Shanghai.
Chen’s paintings employ pointillism as a way to record light, memory, and time. Beginning with transparent color grounds, layers of oil-paint and oil-stick dots gather slowly across the canvas. Over time, this accumulation forms an organic structure that holds the painting together, giving rise to surfaces that shift in density, variation, and a quiet sense of breath. Color is not used to create optical effects, but to build depth through layered contrasts and subtle shifts within analogous hues. Chen’s work grow out of memories of light, water, and landscape. He is interested in how memory exists over time: layered, fluid, and constantly in motion. His paintings resist immediacy and fixed interpretation, unfolding instead through sustained looking. From a distance, the works appear as atmospheres; up close, they break down into countless individual color dots, each moving with its own cadence.
Chen was awarded the Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2018. He participated in the Swatch Art Peace Hotel residency in 2019 and the Leo Gallery residency in 2021, and will join the Viafarini residency in Milan in 2026. His recent solo exhibitions include: Adriatic, Leo Gallery, Shanghai (2025); In Silence, Leo Gallery, Shanghai (2022); Love, Pride, Deep-fried Chicken, Leo Gallery, Shanghai (2021); and Supernova, Leo Gallery, Hong Kong (2021). His works are held in numerous significant private collections worldwide, including that of H.H. Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Aldar Group and Swatch and Peace Hotel Art Center, etc.
