JIN GU: Inorganic Substances
Artists: JIN GU
2025-12-01 – 2025-12-15 · Hangzhou · L Gallery
JIN GU: Inorganic Substances — solo exhibition by JIN GU at L Gallery, Hangzhou, 1 Dec – 15 Dec 2025.
In his own writings, Gu Jin describes contemporary painting as an “inorganic substance” within the system of contemporary art—something seemingly depleted of vitality, whose value no longer appears immediately visible. Yet he also reminds us that, in chemical classification, “inorganic substances” are not limited to residues, oxides, acids, or salts; they also include pure substances—forms of matter stripped of utility and reduced to nothing but their own existence.
For Gu Jin, these paintings are precisely such “pure substances.” They may no longer bear the burden of grand narratives, nor do they promise innovation, yet they retain a trace of an unmediated self. When he openly acknowledges this condition of “meaninglessness,” I am reminded instead of Nietzsche: once old systems of value have collapsed, meaning must be reinvented amidst the ruins. To live toward death is not a dramatic gesture, but a stubborn decision to continue creating, to continue looking, even in the absence of predetermined meaning.
Gu Jin’s “inorganic substances” can be understood as a concrete response to such an attitude toward value. If meaning is no longer granted a priori, then perhaps it must begin again from a lump of clay, from a patch of pigment, from the material itself.
