BANK is pleased to announce that artists Liang Hao, Sun Yitian, and Wenjue are participating in the third edition of the X Museum Triennial, *Researching the Spirit: Emotion, Form, and Concept in Painting*. The exhibition is co-curated by artist Wang Guangle and X Museum Director You Yang, and will be on view at X Museum, Beijing, from September 5 to November 15, 2026.
*Researching the Spirit* proposes a tripartite perceptual structure, approaching painting through the three lenses of emotion, form, and concept to articulate the Zeitgeist of artists working primarily with painting, and to offer audiences more pathways into the language of painting. Bringing together nearly 60 artists whose primary medium is painting, the exhibition features mostly recent works, organized into three sections named after the curatorial triad, and spanning the museum’s first and second floors as well as its public spaces, creating dialogues between works and between spaces.
Liang Hao’s depictions of the Hongqiao Sanatorium stem from his ongoing reflection on modernist architecture. Designed and built in 1934 by Xi Fuquan, an architect who studied in Germany, the tuberculosis sanatorium is widely regarded by architectural historians as one of the most representative examples of early modern Chinese architecture. Its stepped, terraced structure responded to the “heliotherapy” practiced in tuberculosis treatment at the time, ensuring that each south-facing ward received ample sunlight. From the orientation of windows and the depth of balconies to the choice of flooring materials, the entire building was conceived with a single purpose: healing. It stands as a total spatial projection of scientific rationality. Yet in Liang Hao’s restrained and precise rendering, the building is gently lifted from its original functional context. Shadows across its walls and the deep, expansive sky anchor the structure in an ambiguous, almost timeless moment. The sanatorium remains intact, but the promises of rationality and progress that modernism once embodied have, with the passage of time, become the remains of a belief: distant, flawless, and quietly unsettling.
Sun Yitian continues the trajectory of her *Ken* series in *Corona*, taking Barbie’s boyfriend Ken—a symbol of consumer culture—as her central subject, and relocating the toy figure from the realm of popular culture into the narrative framework of religious imagery. Rather than depicting it as a mere toy, the artist seeks to endow it with a vivid, flawless “human face.” When the act of pilgrimage is stripped of its traditional religious content, what it reflects is a spiritual predicament specific to modernity: surface symbols replace deeper meaning, and subjectivity is dissolved within consumer culture into an empty signifier.
Wenjue’s *Paidia* series uses Snakes and Ladders to map the interplay between individual fate and choice. Widely circulated across the British Isles, the game was originally conceived as a moral teaching tool, illustrating for children that good is rewarded and evil punished. Composed of numbered squares, the game has players move across the board, ascending ladders and descending snakes. Later versions introduced two-colored snakes that could move in both directions, embodying both good and evil and reflecting shifting cultural attitudes. In *The Passage to the Aetherial Realms*, a game of Snakes and Ladders unfolds inside a giant’s body: forty-nine squares corresponding to the forty-nine days during which the soul is believed to leave the body. The player must enter the head before reaching the end and retrieve the soul.
Through the distinct entry points of architectural memory, consumer symbols, and the rules of play, the practices of these three artists collectively respond to the exhibition’s core question of how painting continues to unfold its own self-exploration.
