Linda Gallery is honored to announce the opening of Tian Longyu’s solo exhibition “Healing Grief with Burning Sadness” on the afternoon of 24 April, 2022. As the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, it focuses on his “Urban Series” created between 2018-2021.

In the novel “Invisible Cities” by Italian author Italo Calvino,  Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan a grand blueprint for how to modernize cities. The language barrier between the two protagonists forces them to communicate—with some difficulty—through gestures, actions, expressions, sounds and objects pulled from a bag. In these descriptions, cities expand endlessly, far surpassing the human capacity to understand, they become like uncontrollable creatures. Amidst constant modernization and globalization, economic development has become the only driver, and the loss of history and nature is the unfortunate price we pay. Homogenized cities and booming technologies bring with them the maladies of post-industrial societies. The urban condition, characterized by the alienating forces of power and desire, has become part of an unbreakable vicious cycle.

"Healing Grief with Burning Sadness"uses poetic works of art to present the perspective of ordinary people, addressing those who feel swept up in urban life yet unable to escape modernization and globalization.