The Wind Reminds Me of You: Artist: Holden Willard

 

 

Nan Ke Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of The Wind Reminds Me of You, a solo exhibition by American artist Holden Willard, on September 21. As September turns toward autumn, the arrival of dry, cold air from Mongolia and Siberia signals the change of season in Shanghai. Across the globe, in Portland, Maine—Willard’s hometown—polar continental air masses sweep down from vast northern lands, ushering in fall with its cascade of brilliant foliage, much like the layered chromatic richness that animates his paintings: lush, abundant, and vividly alive.

 

61h x 46w cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

Willard grew up, and continues to live, in Portland, Maine. Shaped by the fervent sincerity of rural life, he has consistently portrayed the dazzling magnificence of the natural world, his flowing, unrestrained brushwork echoing the vast rhythms of landscapes breathing beneath an expansive sky. His profound connection to his surroundings forms the foundation of his artistic inquiry, ensuring that his practice remains deeply interwoven with the cultural fabric of Portland.

 

In recent years, his work has been exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, as well as in the 2023 CMCA Biennial and Auctions at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and was presented in the solo exhibition Pictures of Home at Notch8 Gallery in 2025. Through these presentations, Willard continually extends his observation and reimagining of his immediate environment, allowing local experience and universal emotion to converge across the canvas. While portraiture often serves as the visual anchor of his work, it is the unfolding of complete settings—lakes, distant mountains, towering trees, night skies illuminated by golden starlight—that provides the essential narrative force, expanding and completing the pictorial frame.

 

188h x 114w cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

As Leon Battista Alberti observed in the Renaissance, the rectangular panel of a painting fixed to a wall could be understood as a window constructed by perspective, offering viewers a gaze into a “world of representation.” For Willard, painting too becomes a kind of window—not into a literal simulacrum, but into a realm akin to fairy tale. With vivid, untamed color, he conjures animals, plants, mountains, and waters as vessels for expressing love, loss, friendship, and kinship—emotions that transcend cultural borders.

 

61h x 46w cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

“At what point do we diverge from reality and embrace the feeling of something, rather than true identical representation?” For Willard, the aim is never mere verisimilitude. Rather, he weaves together close observation and carefully constructed imagination to capture a sensation of déjà vu. Within the exhibition space of The Wind Reminds Me of You, his canvases seem to open a window onto the historic architecture of Shanghai, transforming it into a portal—across which one glimpses the seaboard landscapes and intimate rhythms of life in the American Northeast.

 

Yet this looking is not motivated by the lure of novelty or difference. It seeks, instead, a kind of empathy beyond difference. By magnifying fragments of his own lived experience, Willard situates himself within the larger weave of nature, elevating the ordinary. In contemplating distant, specific moments of another’s daily life, we may encounter a tenderness that slips through the rigid frame of the grand narrative—a resonance that feels strangely familiar. This is what Willard values most: the textures of nature and life, the ties between people, and the timeless constancy of love.

 

61h x 61w cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

Outside his studio, Willard is also a skilled woodworker and trained art framer, having spent four years in art conservation and mounting. The discipline of craft—manual precision and the labor of the hand—shapes the way he perceives and records life’s granular details. With patience and attentiveness, he captures fleeting expressions and subtle glimmers in the eyes of his sitters, revealing the philosophical depth within everyday life. In his palette, he often replaces naturalistic dark tones with radiant lemon yellows, outlining trees, blossoms, and figures so that they flare with immediacy. This chromatic brightness mirrors his larger purpose: to register the luminous instants hidden within the ordinary, echoes of the familiar glow that unites human experience.

 

97h x 77w cm

© Courtesy of the artist

 

For this exhibition, the curatorial design—featuring grass beneathfoot—allows the movement of air to enter human architecture, fusing the natural with the constructed. Here, space itself becomes an embodiment of “observed fact intertwined with imagined vision.” Echoing Brian O’Doherty’s reflections on the ideology of the gallery, Willard’s work makes clear that “pure viewing” has never been the pursuit. Beneath his direct and figurative depictions lies a deeper aim: to explore how color and atmosphere summon personal memories, how the instant of visual contact might tremble with recognition. Much like the first breath of autumn air filling one’s lungs, it calls forth countless forgotten stories of fall—each at once personal, and universally shared.

 

Text by Roxane Fu