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“In Its Course”—"Channel Flow" is unlike a rushing river, nor does it necessarily point toward some distant horizon. It is
a slender watercourse slowly carved out over time. Water moves through the channel, following the hidden gradients of
everyday life and brushing against the textures left behind by experience.

The viewer, too, moves like water: from painting into channel, following Zhang Nan’s lived experience, seeing through
her eyes and tracking her brushstrokes, gliding over emotions that were once sharp, surging, chaotic, and taut, then
gradually settling down. At times, one pauses somewhere and meets her there; at others, one unexpectedly catches
sight of oneself in a reflection.

Exhibition "In Its Course" brings together Zhang Nan’s works from the past two years and her recent new paintings
across the upper and lower floors of KennaXu Gallery’s Futian space. The first floor looks back on the earlier "swift
current": bodies and faces are pushed to the front of the picture plane, eyes and hands recur as visual motifs, and the
gaze remains hot and intimate, as if emotion were still roiling beneath the skin. The second floor presents her more
recent, restrained "slow current," in which form and emotion return to a more stable order, replacing the forceful
collisions and tearing tensions of before. As time passes, the artist’s lived experience reshapes the painting language,
emotional density, and modes of looking in her work.

In Zhang Nan’s earlier paintings, figures often occupy most of the composition. Under the effect of an abrupt close-up,
the background is sharply compressed and the figure confronts the viewer head-on. Faces are formed through forceful
brushwork that twists, presses, and drags across the surface; the brushstroke seems to wrestle with flesh rather than
simply model form. The figure’s specific identity is erased, leaving behind only a heightened bodily sensation. Eyes and
hands become the core of the figure: the gaze is at times defiant, at times somber, at times unfocused, looking beyond
the frame into emptiness. Hands point, relax, or clench, turning inner tremors into visible bodily states. To view these
earlier works is to be drawn into an involuntary interaction with the figures, caught between the urge to look and the
feeling of being looked at, unable to tell whether one is looking at a painting or being seen by it.

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