In 120 Days of Sodom, Gaojie Chen constructs a continuously operating visual system through a highly self-contained classical pictorial language. With linear narrative development deliberately set aside, tension repeatedly unfolds between order and loss of control, allowing painting itself to function as an apparatus that carries projections of desire, power, and fate. Classical paradigms are reactivated, transforming perspective, arches, axial structures, and rigorous composition into vessels capable of containing disorder.
Installation view of 120 Days of Sodom, Jan. 10, 2026 - Mar. 8, 2026, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai, ©Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery, Photographed by Runxin.Gaojie Chen was born in 1993 in Shunchang, Fujian. He graduated in 2015 from the Second Studio of the Oil Painting Department at the China Academy of Art and currently lives and works in Hangzhou. His long-term practice is devoted to constructing painting as a “burning crystal”—a condensed amalgam of life, mythology, and destiny. Confronted with the overwhelming influx of information in the contemporary world and the isolation of individual experience, Chen anchors his practice in images that are at once absurd and enigmatic, casting fragments gathered from lived experience into an ambiguous, high-temperature alchemical furnace where symbols, obsessions, and unstable emotions continue to generate themselves on the canvas.
Gaojie Chen
The Bestowing Virtue/ The Lightning of the Creating/ The Accepting Virtue，2023
Oil On Canvas
9h x 7w cm each
©Courtesy of the artist
In this exhibition, Chen’s works establish a viewing trajectory that shifts from intimacy to pressure through the juxtaposition of different scales and densities. The small-scale triptych The Bestowing Virtue is set against a background of star-chart motifs imbued with a medieval sensibility, producing a restrained and enclosed sense of time. In the foreground, organs and growing plants appear side by side, compressing internal structures of life and outward proliferation into a tightly limited pictorial field. The result is an almost allegorical space of observation that demands proximity and duration, turning viewing into a slow and introspective act.
Installation view of 120 Days of Sodom, Jan. 10, 2026 - Mar. 8, 2026, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai, ©Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery, Photographed by Runxin.In this exhibition, Chen’s works establish a viewing trajectory that shifts from intimacy to pressure through the juxtaposition of different scales and densities. The small-scale triptych The Bestowing Virtue is set against a background of star-chart motifs imbued with a medieval sensibility, producing a restrained and enclosed sense of time. In the foreground, organs and growing plants appear side by side, compressing internal structures of life and outward proliferation into a tightly limited pictorial field. The result is an almost allegorical space of observation that demands proximity and duration, turning viewing into a slow and introspective act.
Gaojie Chen
The Divine Purge Palace，2021-2023
Oil On Canvas
120h x 72w cm each
©Courtesy of the artist
Chen’s paintings do not seek to transmit fixed meanings. Instead, pictorial segments intertwine and dissolve into one another, gradually forming an encyclopedic network still in the process of becoming—one that even exceeds the artist’s own control or comprehension. Within the context of The 120 Days of Sodom, this resistance to full legibility becomes precisely the means through which classical paradigms regain vitality in the present: rules do not disappear, but as their structures tighten, they generate imaginations that are sharper, more ambiguous, and ultimately unruly.
January 20, 2026
