Mingkai He - The structure of world history

Mingkai He’s painting and artistic practice span multiple domains including politics, the postmodern cultural landscape, and iconology. In constructing his pictorial space, he typically takes historical images and personal imagination as his blueprint, forging a visual experience imbued with mystery.

The entirely new works Mingkai He has created for this solo exhibition not only sustain his consistent, rigorous philosophical reflection on history and politics but also, through a series of relatively small-scale paintings characterized by more relaxed and unrestrained brushwork and painting substrates, document aspects of his personal life ranging from dreams and film works to everyday existence.

These thematically diverse works are in fact unified within the seemingly oppositional realms of world history and personal history—there exists no definitive boundary between the two; instead, they intertwine, generating an inherent tension between grand narrative and personal documentation. Extensive historical images, mythological tales, and personal video records all serve as sources of inspiration for the artist on this occasion, yet during the creative process, the directional significance of these images and texts (treated as raw materials) is completely dismantled, transforming them into signifiers without signifieds, intended to express a metaphysical plasticity.

This body of work places various symbols and metaphors in a single space to contend with one another; such inherent complexity and conflict render invalid any single-perspective analysis of the works. Thus, Mingkai He regards his creations as visual records of personal history and products of desacralized human labor—that is, painting functions both as a tool for shaping and inscribing historical memory, and is itself shaped by history and integrated into it. For him, painting, as a product of condensed time, becomes a component of world history upon its completion and also a visual declaration of the individual’s participation in writing history.

MINGKAI HE

Mingkai He was born in 1995 in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, China, and now lives and works in Shanghai.

EDUCATION

2016 - 2020

. B.A in School of Fine Arts, Capital Normal University, Beijing

2020 - 2023

. M.A in Painting, Royal College of Art, London

2024

. PhD in Art theory, Shanghai Theatre Academy, Shanghai

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Current:

2026

. The Structure of world history, VIN VIN, Vienna

Past:

2024

. Traveling Memories, The Modern Showroom, London

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Recent:

2025

China

. The Collector's Residence, organised by GECO Foundation, Shanghai,

. VIN VIN x _POLIMENO, VIN VIN in collaboration with Valerio Polimeno,

Paris

Past:

2023

. Reasons for Painting - The 5th Inter-Youth International Youth Painting Exhibition, Shanghai West, Bund Art Center, Shanghai, China