We’re pleased to invite you to the opening reception of Tianyue Zhong’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. UNTIL brings together three large-scale oil paintings on canvas. Presented in LOYAL’s chapel space in Lund, the works enter into a direct dialogue with the scale, height, and symmetry of the room.

The three paintings in UNTIL emerge from a single originating moment Tianyue Zhong experienced during a visit to the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Shigatse, Tibet (founded in 1447 CE by Gedun Drub, later recognized as the First Dalai Lama). Observing groups of people ascending a long stone staircase in a continuous, rhythmic flow, she watched from below as bodies overlapped, merged, and separated, at times appearing as a single form before unfolding again. In this moment, she encountered a heightened sense of perception, place, and time that forms the basis of the work. This shifting, collective movement became the foundation for a sustained process of return over the following year and a half.

Zhong revisited this experience through collage and, subsequently, through painting. Rather than reconstructing a fixed scene, she worked to re-enter the sensation of that moment, approaching it not only visually but physically through touch, gesture, and the accumulation of layered marks in oil paint. As she describes it, “this process is like drawing an infinitely long bow… every bit of strength is held within the layers of each painting.”

Recurrence and repetition play a central role in this process, not to reinforce narrative but to dissolve it. By revisiting the same imagery time and again, Zhong explores whether the initial sensibility can remain frozen in time even as memories fade. She questions whether these intuitive outcomes, rooted in a singular source, serve as a continuation of her lived experience or if they have evolved into an independent artistic discourse as they are transplanted across geographical borders and cultural dynamics.

While each painting maintains its own internal logic, they remain closely linked. In Walking Bare, the composition radiates outward from the lower edge, where the suggestion of feet anchors a field of expanding, organic movement. Hurtle emphasizes the sculptural density of the painted surface, while The First Thunder of Spring introduces a more fluid and transitional state, where form begins to loosen and transform. Together, the works hold different states of the same originating vision, at once grounded and volatile, material and elevated.

Throughout her practice, Zhong moves between observation and painting, allowing these processes to inform one another. What emerges is a visual language rooted in lived experience, shaped slowly over time, where forms resist closure and their fluidity is preserved.

Tianyue Zhong (b. 1994, Chengdu) lives and works in Los Angeles. Zhong received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2020), and BA in Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018). Recent exhibitions include Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York), LBF Contemporary (London and Paris), Long Story Short (New York), Tabula Rasa (Beijing), and Loyal Gallery (Stockholm and Los Angeles).

Moving between painting, collage, and drawing, her practice develops through a sustained engagement with personal photographs that are repeatedly revisited, reworked, and distilled over time. Through this process, her work shifts away from representation toward a more embodied and intuitive language, where memory, sensation, and form remain fluid.