Pigment and the Warrior

AAIE Presents

 

Pigment and the Warrior

 

Dates: February 19 – March 5, 2026

Format: Showroom presentation (2 works)

Artist: Cong Ye

Curator: Zhang Kaizhe

Organizer: AAIE Center for Contemporary Art

 

AAIE Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Pigment and the Warrior, a showroom presentation by artist Cong Ye, on view from February 19 to March 5, 2026. Featuring two paintings, the project offers a focused insight into the artist’s ongoing inquiry into painting as a site of resistance, subjectivity, and material intensity.

 

In Cong Ye’s work, the human figure frequently appears in a near-distorted state. Formed through the accumulation of dense, heavy layers of pigment, these rigid bodies are placed within the rectangular structure of the canvas in positions that resist comfort or balance. The figures remain silent, eyes closed, maintaining a sculptural stillness that suggests endurance, refusal, or an unresolved inner tension.

 

The fixed physical framework of the canvas, combined with the stiffness of the depicted bodies, establishes a double sense of constraint. This structure does not merely describe the painted subject, but reflects the condition of painting itself today. In an era in which painting as a medium risks being overproduced and exhausted, the act of continuing to paint becomes a question of commitment. Within this context, the “warrior” is not a heroic image, but a metaphor for the artist’s resolve to persist through the act of painting.

 

Beneath the seemingly immobilized surface, pigment functions as an active force. Painting is treated not as representation, but as a material struggle unfolding silently within the image—seeking to loosen rigid structures, to push against the limits of the frame, and to reintroduce vitality and possibility. What appears static is revealed instead as transitional, leaving the image open to further transformation.

 

For Cong Ye, painting resembles a forced landing on a groundless surface. The process is marked by uncertainty, risk, and challenge. Yet regardless of outcome, the act itself continues—each landing serving only as the precondition for another flight.

 

 

Artist

 

Cong Ye (b. 1996)

Cong Ye received his BA from Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts (Dalian Campus) and an MLitt from The Glasgow School of Art. His practice centers on painting, engaging with questions of pictorial structure, subjectivity, and the ontological condition of the medium.

 

Selected Group Exhibitions

2022 – The Living Room, The Old Hairdresser’s, Glasgow, UK

2022 – Beep Painting Biennial, Elysium Gallery, Swansea, UK

2025 – The Entropy Dance of the Muses, lev. SPACE, Beijing, China

2026 – Observing the Unapparent: The Contingent Space of Painting’s Ontology, BOUNDED SPACE, Beijing, China

 

Award

2021 – The Eleanor Worthington Prize

 

Curator

 

Zhang Kaizhe (b. 1999)

Based between Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Zhang Kaizhe studied painting at The Glasgow School of Art from 2018 to 2022. His curatorial research focuses on the mechanisms of image production and the operation of images within different spatial contexts, with particular attention to perception, viewing structures, and contemporary visual order.