We are pleased to announce Wu Silin’s first solo exhibition at White Space, “A Lonesome Canoe,” opens on October 29, 2022, and runs through January 15, 2023. The exhibition will feature Wu Silin’s latest acrylic paintings.

Drifting away on a canoe, to a faraway place. Since 2020, Wu Silin has been working on her “Robinson” series of acrylic paintings. As the central character of the famous literary novel Robinson Crusoe, Robinson, born into a wealthy middle-class family, began an extraordinary life of exile and isolation. However, the “Robinson” in Wu Silin’s paintings are not pictorial portrayals of the novel but resonate with the contemporaries’ state of existence and spiritual condition.

“Robinson’s” world is gorgeous, marvelous, and riveting: the continuous flow of color succeeds single lines, and the flowing acrylic patches contradict and blend like ink or gouache; single, multiple, and even scattered perspectives often merge in the same pictorial world, where the spectator would step into this wonderland with the figure within. Through her brushwork, the artist rendered delicate expressions and dynamic postures to the figures, animals, or even vegetation in the paintings, allowing them to reveal happiness, joy, loneliness, frustration, and longing.

Through Wu Silin’s depiction, “Robinson” often transforms without a distinct gender, but only a boat-like hat on his head would allow us to identify its existence. He travels on a canoe through dry lands, sometimes calling on friends, and others, on a lonesome journey. Its life is full of ordinary and bewildering encounters, with dogs, cats, and plants as companions, but also filled with run-ins with Casper David Friedrich or suddenly diving into the chaos of Salvador Dali’s time and space. It, like everyone else, has passions and feelings, whose bravery of “being towards death” also brought his infinite loneliness. He travels, pauses, and self-entertains without losing the desire to connect with others and the world.

“Sitting alone by oneself and imagining what one would not attain is useless – This is an absolute truth that has re-invigorated me.” Perhaps, “Robinson’s world” is similar to Wu Silin’s and each of us. Even if life is like a single canoe, we still should go into the world to meet and act.