布面丙烯综合材料
Human civilisation has spent an extraordinarily long time trying to prove that the Devil does not exist, yet has never quite managed to offer a convincing explanation for its own remarkable enthusiasm for evil.
In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the Devil, appearing as Woland, pays a visit to a world that has long since ceased to believe in him. Surprisingly, he brings with him very little evil that is genuinely new. Greed, vanity, and betrayal have already found their rightful places in human society, even developing a remarkably sophisticated social order of their own. All the Devil really does is magnify them ever so slightly, allowing people to recognise what they would rather not admit about themselves.
Taking Bulgakov’s novel as its point of departure, Nan Ke Gallery brings together the works of seven artists—Olaf Hajek, Yang Di, Wang Yunchun, Andy Marlowe, Cao Jinyan, Zhu Xueqing, and Shao Annan—to explore those experiences that resist explanation, somewhere between myth and reality, reason and absurdity.
Even as reason came to be regarded as the only legitimate form of knowledge in modern society, myths, witchcraft, dreams, and prophecies did not simply disappear. They merely retreated into the dimmer corners of human consciousness, where they continue to exist through images, symbols, rituals, and metaphors.
Art and witchcraft may share a rather unsettling resemblance. Both seek, through the rearrangement of materials, symbols, and forms, to grant a certain kind of existence to things that did not previously exist. In this sense, artists need not actually believe in magic to engage in something remarkably close to its practice. Perhaps what makes both supernatural phenomena and works of art so unsettling is precisely their ability to reveal, with almost unbearable directness, a reality that is otherwise too glaring to confront.
This exhibition approaches mysticism as an ongoing question: when we are convinced that we have already understood the world, how much of it have we excluded from reality simply because it refuses to conform to our ways of understanding?
After all, perhaps the most perplexing thing about the Devil has never been whether he exists, but that, when he finally appears, we discover that he understands human society far better than humanity understands itself.
Elena and Margarita: The Redeemer Who Was Created
The Master and Margarita occupies an extraordinary position in European literary history. Widely regarded as one of the most important works of twentieth-century Russian literature, it is also among the most legendary novels to emerge from the Soviet era. Yet its status as a classic was by no means assured from the moment of its publication.
In the novel, the Master is a writer who has composed a book about Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notsri. His manuscript is rejected by the literary establishment and subjected to severe criticism. Driven to despair, he burns his manuscript and eventually finds himself in a psychiatric hospital.
Jinyan Cao
Opéra, 2026
Mixed media on canvas
200h x 150w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Margarita, meanwhile, is the Master's lover. Desperate to find him after his disappearance, she accepts an invitation from the Devil, Woland. Anointed with a magical ointment, she transforms into a witch, flies across Moscow by night, and presides as hostess over Woland's infernal ball.
This is arguably one of the novel's most visually extraordinary episodes. Through her flight, Margarita experiences a freedom that releases her from the conventions of everyday social life. No longer defined solely by marriage, class, or social expectations, she becomes a figure capable of choosing, acting, and even destroying on her own terms.
Yet Margarita is never presented as a conventional embodiment of feminine purity. She willingly enters into an alliance with the Devil; she is capable of anger, desire, vengeance, and compassion. Her moral strength lies not in being without flaws, but in retaining the capacity for choice and mercy amid profoundly ambiguous circumstances.
Mikhail Bulgakov and Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, in 1940
In reality, Bulgakov's third and final wife, Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, is widely regarded as one of the principal inspirations for Margarita. The two met while Elena was still married, endured a period of separation, and eventually married in 1932.
In the novel, Margarita enters the Devil's world and becomes a witch in her determination to save the Master. In life, Elena spent more than two decades after her husband's death preserving, organising, and fighting for the publication of his manuscript. Bulgakov died in 1940, and it was not until 1966 that the novel finally began appearing in print.
The fictional Margarita helped bring about the Master's salvation. In reality, it was Elena who ensured that the work itself would not disappear into oblivion.
Xueqing Zhu
Closing Speech, 2026
Oil on canvas
190h x 150w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
The Devil's Grace
In the novel, Woland returns the Master's manuscript, long since consigned to the flames, and utters the celebrated words: “Manuscripts don't burn.” In reality, Bulgakov himself had thrown an early manuscript of The Master and Margarita into the fire in 1930, following a series of devastating setbacks in his literary career. What appears in the novel as a supernatural declaration thus becomes an uncanny prophecy of the author's own fate.
Olaf Hajek
Night Discussion, 2025
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
145h x 90w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
On 18 April 1930, Joseph Stalin personally telephoned Bulgakov. At the time, Bulgakov's plays had repeatedly been banned, and his opportunities for publication were severely restricted. He had written to the Soviet authorities requesting permission to leave the country or, failing that, a position that would at least allow him to earn a living. Stalin's telephone call altered his circumstances. Bulgakov subsequently obtained a position at the Moscow Art Theatre, yet he never truly escaped the restrictions imposed upon his creative freedom and his ability to publish.
Annan Shao
UFO, 2026
3D printing resin, natural stone coating, felt, acrylic, pearl paint, model paint, LED spotlight, rain flower stone
51h x 57.7w x 63d cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Stalin's attitude towards Bulgakov remained deeply contradictory. He had expressed admiration for the playwright's work, yet he was also the supreme authority of the very political system that constrained his artistic life.
This inevitably calls to mind Woland, whose almost inexplicable authority allows him to punish, protect, expose, and even transform the destinies of others. Of course, it would be reductive to identify Woland simply as a fictional incarnation of Stalin. Nevertheless, the unpredictability of absolute power in the historical world bears a disturbing resemblance to the Devil's exercise of authority in the novel.
Both relationships reveal a particularly insidious irony: under absolute authority, people may come to believe that even freedom itself is a gift for which they ought to be grateful. Yet in Bulgakov's novel, the Devil is not merely an embodiment of evil. He may also be the one who reveals the truth. The boundaries between good and evil, the sacred and the profane, are anything but stable. The novel even ventures to ask: if evil did not exist, how would good define itself?
Andy Marlowe
Filled Only with Light, 2026
Oil and reflective fabric on MDF
11.4h x 15.2w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
A Heretical Theory of Reality
Mysticism is often dismissed by the mainstream as a departure from reality. Yet perhaps it arises from a profound distrust of what we take reality to be: is what we see truly all there is? What we call reality is, to some extent, a collective understanding gradually established over the course of human history. Artists, as it happens, are often among those least inclined to abide by such agreements. If reason and science constitute the orthodoxy through which modern society understands the world, then perhaps art is a heretical theory of reality.
Yunchun Wang
Where to find the philosopher's stone, 2026
Acrylic & oil on wood
55.5h x 44.5w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
In Olaf Hajek's paintings, folklore, ancient mythology, and botanical and animal imagery intertwine, transforming nature into an allegorical world filled with hidden symbols. Wang Yunchun draws upon literature, nature, and everyday experience, extracting symbolic forms and constructing, through memory and intuition, psychological landscapes that hover between abstraction and figuration. Andy Marlowe's practice moves between religious iconography, female portraiture associated with the 1960s, and grotesque narratives. By rearranging familiar cultural symbols, he allows seemingly recognisable images to acquire ambiguous and unsettling meanings.
Di Yang
Ideale Szene der Zukunft, 2026
Hahnemühle baryta paper
156h x 96w cm x 2 / 160h x 100w cm x 2 (framed)
6+1ap
© Courtesy of the artist
Through cinematic language, photography, and staged environments, Yang Di questions the reliability of visual evidence and the ways in which truth is constructed through the act of looking. Zhu Xueqing employs fairy-tale absurdity and bodily metaphors to transform personal emotions, experiences of growing up, and the conditions of womanhood into narratives suspended between dreams and reality.
Drawing upon trauma and psychological experience, Cao Jinyan explores the material forms of emotion through painting and installation, as well as the possibility of art as a source of psychological solace. Shao Annan constructs speculative worlds through virtual ecologies, science-fiction imaginaries, and mixed-media installations, allowing individual psychic structures and the established order of reality to reflect one another within absurd scenarios.
Jinyan Cao
Arrive at Mobius, 2025
Acrylic on canvas, mineral pigments
150h x 110w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Through their distinct visual languages, the seven artists respond to an ancient question: is the reality we know truly all that reality contains? Just as Bulgakov's Devil does not invent the absurdities of human existence but merely reveals what was there all along, art need not necessarily create another world. Perhaps its task is simply to allow us to see again those things that have always existed within this one, yet have never quite been acknowledged.
As for whether the Devil actually exists, perhaps that is no longer particularly important. At least in Bulgakov's view, humanity has already done most of his work for him. All that remains is for artists to occasionally provide him with a little fresh imagination.