Luce Gallery is proud to present the first Solo Exhibition by Chen Tianyi, born in Nanjing, China, 1996 and living in Tokyo.
In “The Mayfly”, the Artist is presenting a series of new paintings in his first solo exhibition in Europe.

A brief, ephemeral flutter of wings sweeps through this exhibition, suspended between time and fading. The works move like memories surfacing in the mind's lanes, familiar yet unreachable. Here, the urban landscape is not a place but an emotional state, a labyrinth where the present bends to dream. Figures emerge and vanish, like memories that resist clarity. Painting becomes a threshold: between the visible and the invisible, between what has been and what could be. The artist constructs surreal metaphors that ask not to be explained, but to be traversed. Each canvas is a fragment of consciousness, an echo of experiences beyond words. In this space, the everyday is transfigured into vision. And the viewer is invited to lose themselves, as if in a memory that refuses to end.

"Wandering. Night-walking.
An uninterrupted overview of time.

On the streets of a foreign land, I imagine myself as a 'Mayfly' in the city—suspended between reality and dream, pausing at their intersection while searching for lost coordinates along ascending ramps. The granular mineral pigments (iwaenogu) I employ act both as debris of time and as anchors of memory. Through layering, grinding, and exfoliation, light and shadow are rendered almost eternal, completing a breath of existence that stretches across millennia.

Traditionally, the Mayfly—living at dawn and dying at dusk—has served as an extreme metaphor for transience. In my practice, however, this figure transcends its biological and poetic connotations to become an existential condition: a continuous, fluid rhythm of wandering and night-walking within the unfamiliar fabric of the city.”

Titled The Mayfly, the exhibition presents Chen’s recent investigation into the relationship between individual identity and urban space. Having lived abroad for many years, the artist does not experience wandering as rootlessness, but as a constant oscillation between reality and dream, the familiar and the estranged. This condition resonates with what he defines as an “Intermediate Area”: a liminal zone that is neither fully objective nor entirely subjective.

In these works, nocturnal streets, flickering lights, and intersecting ramps cease to function as mere visual subjects. Instead, they become psychological landscapes—stretched by time and filtered through memory. The materiality of mineral pigments, formed over geological epochs, enters into dialogue with the immediacy of gesture, generating a surface charged with tension. Each layer becomes a trace of the mayfly’s fleeting passage, recording a temporal structure of experience—what might be described as a continuous unfolding between retention and anticipation.

The Ramp series in the exhibition finds further expansion here. Through radical shifts in perspective, stable architectural forms reveal an inherent instability. This instability mirrors the wanderer’s ongoing negotiation of identity within a foreign cultural context. Through the lens of “anemoia”—a nostalgia for places never personally experienced—Chen constructs collective, imagined geographies across the pictorial surface.

“Although the life of a Mayfly is fleeting, its flight occupies space absolutely. Likewise, the solitary journey of the nightwalker encounters the density of time through movement.” Chen Tianyi invites viewers into a quiet nocturnal world composed of mineral layers, where ephemeral yet authentic moments of affect emerge—delicate, luminous, and transient, like the wings of a Mayfly. A confrontation with time. A return to the self.

Biography‍

Chen Tianyi (b. 1996, in Nanjing, China), lives and works in Tokyo.
He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts as an undergraduate in 2018 and Received his MFA from Tama Art University and Tokyo University of the Arts in 2022 and 2024 respectively.
Recent Exhibitions include As I walked out one evening (Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China, 2025) and Structure of the landscape (Gallery Binosha, Tokyo, Japan, 2023), Skipping Stones (Union Pacific, London, UK, 2026) Will+s Vol. 9, (SOGO Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan, 2025).
The Mayfly is his first Solo Exhibition with Luce Gallery. 

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