孙晓岚 Sun Xiaolan · Solo Exhibition Curated by Ziyan Xu
D Contemporary, London · 3–8 June 2026
Whiteshepherd Gallery, in collaboration with D Contemporary, presents the London solo debut of Hangzhou painter Sun Xiaolan — twenty oil paintings of water, light and memory, curated by Ziyan Xu, in partnership with Turbulence Creative, JustArt Newspaper Club and ourculture.
London, May 2026
Whiteshepherd Gallery and D Contemporary are pleased to announce After the Mist: What the Water Remembers (岚散之后，水还记得), a solo exhibition by Hangzhou-based artist Sun Xiaolan, curated by Ziyan Xu. The exhibition opens on 3 June 2026 and runs through 8 June, with a Private View on 3 June from 3:00 to 5:00 PM. It is open to the public from 3 to 5 June (11:00 AM – 5:00 PM daily) and available by appointment from 6 to 8 June.
The Exhibition
After the Mist: What the Water Remembers is Sun Xiaolan’s first solo exhibition in London and her second major European presentation, following her acclaimed show Parler au vent, Parler à la montagne at Galerie Francis Barlier, Paris, in February 2026, attended by the President of the Société des Artistes Français. Gaoliang, Corresponding Member of the Institut de France, described her work as “a cup of the finest tea, drawing one into its depth.”
Twenty oil paintings on canvas and panel, spanning 2023 to 2026, gather here as a single long looking. The shimmer of West Lake at dawn; a market at Tianmuli alive with the warmth of ordinary life; a honey-coloured pond glowing in its own silence; two wild ducks drifting across still water, slowing the whole world down. Works range from the monumental Spring Water Rising (春水生, 140×140 cm) to intimate twenty-by-twenty centimetre panel paintings — every work an act of sustained attention, a return to a familiar place rendered with the patience of someone who has learned to wait for light.
Sun Xiaolan lives and works in Hangzhou. Her paintings live in the condition of flow. Rooted in the contemplative tradition of Chinese landscape philosophy and working in the language of contemporary European oil painting, she makes of paint itself a container for feeling. In her work, light is the shape of time; water is the mirror of memory. Her surfaces are organised around diffusion and overflow — light spreading across water, reflections exceeding their origins, edges dissolving into air at the moment of touch. Luce Irigaray observed that Western thought has long privileged form and boundary, while fluidity, overflow, and multiplicity — those things that exceed any outline — constitute a deeper and more elusive mode of being. Sun Xiaolan’s paintings give this fluidity visible form: the more intently you look, the more the surface opens, like water widening at every edge, always in the act of becoming.
The title turns on the character at the heart of the artist’s own name — 岚 (lán), mountain mist, that breath of vapour that rises at dawn and is gone by morning. After the mist lifts, the water still holds what passed through it: the quality of the light, the weight of a cloud’s reflection, the particular stillness of a moment before the world woke up. Gaston Bachelard, writing in Water and Dreams (1942), proposed that water is the element of material imagination: the substance through which we dream, feel, and remember before language arrives to name what we are experiencing. Sun Xiaolan’s paint dwells in exactly this way — carrying feeling quietly before speech, preserving time the way a lake holds light: openly, already, before any word arrives. This is an exhibition about an interior landscape — the luminous surface inside each of us that catches light, holds colour, and quietly remembers.
Curatorial Framework
The exhibition is curated by Ziyan Xu, whose practice focuses on Gender Identity, Migration & Diaspora, and Feminist Body Politics. Xu situates Sun Xiaolan’s paintings within a contemporary feminist philosophical framework, drawing on Luce Irigaray’s theory of fluid mechanics — the idea that Western thought has long privileged form and boundary over fluidity and multiplicity — and Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of water as the element of material imagination: the substance through which we feel and remember before language arrives. These frameworks are not imposed upon the work; they are drawn out by it.
About Whiteshepherd Gallery
Whiteshepherd is a London-based nomadic gallery and curatorial platform working with emerging artists whose practices navigate diaspora, displacement, and cross-cultural identity. Founded in a South Kensington townhouse and now active across multiple London venues, the gallery’s mobility is not incidental — it reflects a curatorial position that art made at the edges of culture cannot be contained within a single room.
Whiteshepherd works with artists from the earliest stages of their careers: building first exhibition concepts, developing sustainable commercial frameworks, and creating the conditions for their work to be seen across cultural contexts. In close collaboration with XIMA Gallery — which operates three spaces in China — Whiteshepherd brings artists into dialogue with Chinese audiences through exhibitions, residencies, and art fairs.
The gallery does not seek to build a bridge between East and West — a bridge implies a symmetry that does not exist. It seeks instead to create the conditions for effective friction: moments where different aesthetic frameworks, viewing habits, and critical languages meet without being prematurely resolved.
About D Contemporary
D Contemporary serves as a dynamic platform that champions top emerging and mid-career artists, both UK-based and international. We support artistic practices across a wide range of media — from painting and sculpture to digital works and installation art — while fostering critical dialogue and cross-cultural exchange. Our annual calendar includes a curated series of solo and group exhibitions, artist talks, and collaborations with cultural institutions and independent curators. Championing London’s and the international contemporary art scene, D Contemporary also works with world embassies on cultural diplomacy, supporting artists from markets with limited exposure to world art capitals. Currently located at 1 Birdcage Walk, Westminster, while its Mayfair home undergoes renovation.
Additional Event · 4 June 2026, 2:30 PM
On 4 June the exhibition space hosts AI Agents, Art & Taste: Future Art-Tech Production in Practice — a free public afternoon featuring an Art & Tech talk by Roxanne Jingxuan Zhao (Turbulence Creative) and an AI Food Art Tasting Experience by Deep Food x Joseph Wan. RSVP: https://shorturl.at/CUHgG
